A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences
sbell@bowdoin.edu
(207) 725-3292
Sociology And Anthropology
315 Adams Hall
Mailing Address:
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bowdoin College, 7000 College Station
Brunswick, ME 04011-8470
The first A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences, Susan E. Bell joined the Bowdoin faculty in 1983. Her specialty is the sociology of health and illness, in which she investigates the experience of illness, women's health, and visual and performative representations of the politics of cancer, medicine, and women's bodies. Currently, she is exploring the global flow of biomedical knowledge and spatial permeability by listening to and analyzing stories constructed in interactions between immigrant patient populations and staff in a U.S. hospital outpatient clinic.
Susan E. Bell and Anne E. Figert, "Medicalization and Pharmaceuticalization at the Intersections: Looking Backward, Sideways and Forward." Social Science and Medicine, 75 (5): 775-783, 2012. PDF
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Mary Ellen Bell and Susan E. Bell, "What to Do with All this 'Stuff': Memory, Family, and Material Objects." Storytelling, Self, Society, 8(2): 63 - 84, 2012. PDF
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Inventory of Stuff![]() click image to enlarge Photo Credit: Sarah E. Sutter |
DES Daughters
Embodied Knowledge and the Transformation of Women's Health Politics, Temple University Press, 2009
DES Daughters information, resources, and reviews site»
“Claiming justice: knowing mental illness in the public art of Anna Schuleit’s ‘Habeas Corpus’ and ‘Bloom’,” special number of health 15:3, 2011 (published online Feb. 18, 2011)
Guest Editor with Alan Radley, “Another Way of Knowing: Art, Disease, and Illness Experience,” special number of health, 15:3, 2011
“Gender and the medicalization of health care,” with Anne E. Figert. Pp. 107-122 in Ellen Kuhlmann and Ellen Annandale, eds. Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Healthcare, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. PDF
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“Visual methods for collecting and analyzing data.” Pp. 513-535 in Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, Raymond DeVries, and Robert Dingwall, eds., The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Methods in Health Research. Sage Publications, 2010. PDF
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"Artworks, collective experience, and claims for social justice: the case of women living with breast cancer," with Alan Radley. Sociology of Health & Illness 29(3):366-390, 2007
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"Living with breast cancer in text and image: Making art to make sense." Qualitative Research in Psychology, special issue on "embodiment" 3(1):31-44, 2006.
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"Becoming a mother after DES: Intensive mothering in spite of it all." Pp. 233-252 in Anna De Fina, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg, eds. Discourse and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
"Vaginal politics: Tensions and possibilities in The Vagina Monologues," with Susan M. Reverby, Women's Studies International Forum, 28:430-444, 2005. Click here for a link to V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls.
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"Intensive performances of mothering: A sociological perspective," Qualitative Research 4(1):45-75, 2004
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"Sexual synthetics: Women, science, and microbicides," in Monica Casper, ed., Synthetic Planet: Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Modern Life, Routledge, 2003
"Photo images: Jo Spence's narratives of living with illness," Health 6(1):5-30, 2002. Click here to view Jo Spence's photographs.
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"Experiencing illness in/and narrative," in Chloe Bird, Peter Conrad, Allen Fremont, and Sol Levine, eds., Handbook of Medical Sociology, fifth edition, Prentice-Hall, 2000
"Narratives and lives: Women's health politics and the diagnosis of cancer for DES daughters," Narrative Inquiry 9(2):347-389, 1999
"Birth control," with Lauren Wise (Bowdoin class of '96) and with the assistance of Judith Norsigian and Susannah Cooper-Doyle, in Boston Women's Health Book Collective, eds., Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century, Simon and Schuster, 1998
"Gendered medical science: Producing a drug for women." Feminist Studies, 21(3):469-500, 1995.
"Translating science to the people: Updating The New Our Bodies, Ourselves." Women's Studies International Forum, 17(1): 9-18, 1994.
Photo Credit:
Tattoo, Martha Hall, 1998.
Photograph by Dennis Griggs. Courtesy of Alan Hall.
From the collections of the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College
Arts![]() click image to enlarge |