Surveillance, knowledge and risk: the embodied experience of cervical screening

Abstract

Risk and surveillance have emerged as two prominent themes concerning the substantive topic of public health and prevention. While these themes have largely been addressed as discrete issues within the sociology of health and illness, of late there has been a concerted effort to address the relationship between the two. This paper examines an aspect of prevention which is often implicitly identified in terms of both risk and surveillance; that of cervical screening in Britain. First I discuss how risk and surveillance have been brought together in the sociology of health and illness and outline some limitations in their application to substantive topics such as prevention. Second, I introduce cervical screening and proceed with a discussion of textual and interview data which throws light on the status of risk in cervical screening as both an objective and subjective category.