Foreword: Social and Cultural Perspectives on Health, Technology and Medicine

As someone who majored as an undergraduate in both sociology and anthropology, I have often felt that these two disciplines are rather arbitrarily and unnecessarily separate from each other. I then went on to complete a professional public health higher degree (a Master’s of Public Health) followed by a doctorate within public health in a Faculty of Medicine that brought sociology and media and cultural studies to bear on a medical condition (HIV/AIDS). It became more apparent to me that interdisciplinary sociocultural perspectives on health and medical issues were vitally important. When studying such topics as epidemiology, health promotion and health economics during the Master’s degree, my training in sociology and anthropology provoked me to challenge and question the taken-for-granted norms and assumptions that underpinned them