Agency through medicalization: Ghanaian children navigating illness, medicine and adult resistance

Colette Santah and Christian Bröer

Social Science & Medicine, 2022, vol. 315, issue C

Abstract: Medicalization in the Global North assumes that bottom-up medicalization is driven by increasing consumer power, risk avoidance among professionals, or emancipation. Building on ethnographic work of the first author, this article aimed to explore the existence and conditions of a different and novel mechanism and found children manifesting agency through self-medicalization. We look at how Ghanaian children pragmatically deal with everyday health concerns and argue children are agents of medicalization and medicalization enables agency in children.

Keywords: Medicalization; Ghana; Children; Agency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115504

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