Health, Ethnicity and Diabetes

"This is an important study of lived experience of a chronic condition, diabetes, against the background of race, ethnicity and notions of difference. It constitutes an important addition to the sociological literature on chronic illness generally and ethnicity, race and chronic illness in particular. The study is impressively contextualised within relevant sociological literatures. The book is an important resource for academic researchers, students and policy makers like." (Professor Waqar Ahmad, Middlesex University, UK)

This book explores the often contentious relationship between health, concepts of race and ethnicity, and the impact on South Asian groups. Using medical sociological and anthropological perspectives, it excavates racialised constructions of diabetes ‘risk’ within discourses, and highlights the contrasting counter narratives in people’s accounts of their everyday lives.
By identifying a number of components to the discursive, racialised construction of ‘risky’ South Asian bodies, this book problematises taken for granted understandings of culture, lifestyle and genetic risk. The mobilisation of these mechanisms in health science and interventions result in a racialising gaze, directed at groups already experiencing historically embedded race-related issues. The book situates these constructions of risk against the emergent, fluid and dynamic counter narratives to risk constructions. The new found momentum in genetic science is also critiqued in its formulation of racial-genetic risk, especially in the case of diabetes in South Asian groups, and is identified as perpetuating a series of racializing processes.