Abstracts

Morning Panel: Gendering War

Professor Cynthia Cockburn
(City University)

Feminist antimilitarism: scope, problematic and difficulties
in a global social movement

Dr Helen Liebling
(Coventry University)

Meg Stacey Annual Memorial Lecture:
'Research and intervention with women war survivors in
Uganda: The health consequences of war'

This paper will describe the experiences and resulting effects of gender-based violence and torture experienced by women war survivors in Luwero District, Uganda. The impact on women’s health and cultural identity (Obbo, 1989) will be highlighted by drawing on case examples from PhD research carried out using feminist methodologies. Data analysis revealed serious implications for women war-torture survivors in this region, particularly with respect to gynaecological and reproductive health (AGOU, 1999; Liebling, 2003). However despite the severity of these effects, this paper illustrates how women actively continue to reconstruct their identities (El-Bushra, 2000). It also describes women’s participation in a workshop held to disseminate research findings utilising a local theatre group (Liebling, 2004), as well as their involvement in focused interventions.

Policy implications and service requirements are discussed in light of these findings (Liebling and Kiziri-Mayengo, 2002). Women’s resulting health needs are argued to be a fundamental human right, as affirmed at the Cairo and Beijing world conferences on women (see Short, 1999; WHO, 2002). It is recommended that to be successful integrated health interventions for war-torture survivors in this context needs to be combined with the further collective empowerment of women.

Professor Linda McKie (Glasgow Caledonian University) and Dr Chris Yuill (The Robert Gordon University)

Sociological Perspectives on Defining and Accounting for Violence: Gender and the Conflict in Northern Ireland

This paper comprises four main sections. Following the introduction we briefly outline the contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland. We then review key sociological theories on violence and subsequently feminist and pro-feminist work. In the final section we seek to gender the conflict in Northern Ireland, noting not only the relative limitations of sociological work on that conflict, but also the absence of women and gender in most analyses. In the conclusions we reflect upon theoretical and empirical issues for the sociological work on gender and health and illness.

Professor Liz Stanley
(University of Newcastle)

Feminist scholarship and moral life: using Charles Goddard’s ‘The Boer mother’ to think about good, bad, death, mourning, vengeance, justice and other big ideas

Dr Parita Mukta
(University of Warwick)

The Vision of a Peaceable Life

Taking the 2002 Gujarat genocide as a starting point, the paper will look at the relationship between terror and hope; the politics of vengeance and the politics of care; between the intentionality of killings and the working towards a better future. It will examine the different forms of violence and the different forms of suffering under the rule based on bigotry.

Afternoon Panel: Professional Regulation

Sir Donald Irvine (Picker Institute Europe)

Meg Stacey: The New Professionalism in Medicine

Professor Margaret Stacey – Meg -as her friends and many admirers affectionately knew her, became a lay member of the General Medical Council in 1976, serving until 1984. In her wonderful book, Regulating British Medicine, she says that her decision to serve flowed from her sense of increasing anxiety about the workings of the GMC. Previously people had urged her to write about it. She took the most unusual step of deciding to tackle the task from the inside. As a highly professional sociologist she would document the machinery for regulating doctors from the perspective of an outsider who had stepped into the house of medicine. She thought that would be helpful to the public and to the many doctors who were anxious that their system of professional self-regulation should work well.

And that is exactly what happened. She appeared on the scene at what we now know was the beginning of the end of what we might call ‘doctor – centred’ medicine, and the tentative first steps towards a professional culture which puts the patient at the heart of things. In her book she called it the ‘new professionalism’.

In planning her research she identified several themes to pursue in greater detail: professional unity versus public responsibility; clinical autonomy versus competence to practise; the GMC and the Department of Health; and the GMC and the profession. What resulted was an outstanding piece of work written with a literary style that made a potentially dull subject come alive.

But what may be of most interest to us today is to see how far-sighted she actually was, and what impact she had in shaping the future.

I was appointed to the GMC three years after Meg had joined. I was there until I stepped down from the Presidency in 2001.In those intervening years I was part of a band of doctors who thought as she and other lay reformers of the day did. I had learnt earlier, from the late Margot Jeffries whom I knew before I met Meg, that the discipline of sociology had much to offer doctors who wanted to know more about and to understand better their own culture. 

In this lecture I will attempt to assess the significance and importance of Megs contribution to the development of a medical profession in tune with the public’s expectations today, a profession that is capable of sustaining and justifying patients’ trust.

Dr Jocelyn Cornwell (London School of Economics and Political Science)

The short life of a regulator: the case of the Commission for Health Improvement

The paper discusses the short life of the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI) from establishment (2000) to abolition (2004) from the personal point of view an insider. Jocelyn Cornwell was deputy chief executive 2000-3, and acted as chief executive in the final year of CHI’s existence as its staff and functions were transferred to the Healthcare Commission.

In writing about the General Medical Council (GMC), Meg Stacey came to the conclusion that it had failed, and would continue to fail to protect patients. CHI was one part of the Blair government’s response to that failure. The paper takes the questions Meg Stacey asked about the GMC and applies them to CHI. It examines why CHI was established, who it was for and how it went about its business. The paper concludes with an assessment of whether or not, thirteen years on from the publication of Meg’s work on medical regulation, patients are or are not better served by the regulatory system, taken as a whole.

Professor Gillian Lewando Hundt (University of Warwick)

Women’s Experiences of Risky Knowledge and the Technological Imperative: Genetic Prenatal Screening

This paper links to some key concerns within the work of Meg Stacey, namely the development of reproductive health technologies or what she termed ‘third party involvement in formerly intimate affairs’ (272:2002), the changing division of labour in health care and the role of women as unpaid as well as paid  health workers These issues are explored through looking at  aspects of  prenatal genetic screening. By utilising a survey, observation, key informant and individual semi structured interviews and tape recordings of clinic consultations, a nuanced understanding of the social and organisational impact and meaning of  prenatal screening is possible.

The innovative technologies with increasing speed of delivery at point of care present health professionals and women with mixed messages to deliver and absorb and they are reflected on in different ways. Early ultrasound scans and testing for biochemical markers are technologies that brings reassurance and confirmation but also information about possible anomalies. Understandings of the screening procedures and its results as well as Down’s syndrome are multiple both amongst women and health professionals owing to their personal social backgrounds and values. These technologies are experienced as part of the ‘pedagogies of everyday life’ as both authoritative and experiential embodied knowledge that although imparted in the clinic are considered often long before and after the clinic encounters. 

Luke C. 1996  Feminisms and Pedgagogies of Everday Life New York, State University of New YorkPress

Stacey M.  2002 Concluding comments in Gender Health and Healing, Eds G. Bendelow, M. Carpenter, C. Vautier, S. Williams

Dr Geraldine Brady (Coventry University)

‘I would like to be normal and popular’: children’s experiences of ADHD

In recent years there has been growing interest in the medically defined condition of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In debates surrounding the issue of ADHD the views of the scientific community and health care professionals have taken priority. In this paper I will discuss tensions which arise when children’s emotional and behavioural difficulties are medicalised. Children who are given a diagnosis, labelled, and then treated with psychostimulant medication may be subject to unintentional damage yet, by providing no support or solution for children who are experiencing a difficult time unintentional suffering may also be caused. Through her work, Meg Stacey drew attention to the active role played by children and young people in the health care division of labour. In this paper I will show how children’s own perspectives, which often conflict with those of adults, demonstrate the positive and less positive affects of receiving a medical diagnosis. Examples from qualitative research which used the ‘draw and label’ method and unstructured interviewing will be given in order to show how children and young people are competent social actors whose views should be included and valued by health care professionals, teachers and parents when considering the effect of medical diagnosis.