Food allergy is an illness that requires constant risk management in everyday life. To date, there is no cure or preventive treatment, and the only way to manage the condition is therefore careful avoidance of the offending foodstuff and treatment of reactions when they occur. This article draws on a socio-cultural approach to explore parents' understandings and management of child food allergy in the context of everyday life, as 'situated' risk. A focus group study was carried out with 31 parents of children diagnosed with food allergy at two children's hospitals. The analysis of the focus group material reveals how the management of allergy risk seems to permeate most aspects of everyday life as well as how the parents draw on a dominant norm of risk avoidance as well as a counter-discourse of calculated risk taking. The patterns of risk management found in this study are discussed in terms of how risk avoidance and risk taking are intertwined and balanced in the context of moral parenthood.

In the practice of health surveillance, health professionals have to cope with the task of communicating outcomes of tests and measurements, as well as counselling individuals about present and future threats to their own or their children's health.Research in this field has shed some light on the`language of risk' and its implications for how the individual understands and deals with health in everyday life. Here, we want to further this exploration of the language of risk and to discuss the meaning of risk, normality and deviance. We focus on the implicit or explicit introduction and interpretation of threat in the communication between health professionals and patients in two programmes of health surveillance: child health surveillance and surveillance of 40-year-old men. Common themes in these two versions of health surveillance are discussed in relation to the meaning of risk, normality and threats for the future.

The health and wellbeing of children and young people has been studied from a range of different perspectives in social science and the health sciences as a whole. Much of the research to date has been for or on children and has focused on promoting health, detecting illness and its causes or investigating the social determinants of health. While these make vital contributions to making the world better for children and young people, we would argue there is also a need for research with children, research from a child perspective, to fully understand the meaning and impact of health and illness in children's lives. Furthermore, there is a need to explore the social and cultural contexts of child health that frame the lived experiences of children and their parents. More specifically, there is a need to interrogate the explicit as well as the implicit perceptions of childhood and the child in health policy, perceptions that are reproduced in various health and social practices. The purpose of this issue is to contribute to a further understanding of these issues by bridging developments in the sociology of childhood and the sociology of health and illness.In the last decades we have seen a growing interest across disciplines in research on children's own experiences and understandings of health and illness. It can be argued that this increasing interest has been stimulated by developments in the sociology of childhood. Through the 1990s a body of work emerged which criticised dominant notions of child development where children were largely depicted as immature and passive objects of socialisation (Burman 1994, Halldén 1991, James and Prout 1997, Qvortrup 1994.Scholars of the sociology of childhood problematised these notions of the child by theorising the ways in which childhood is socially constructed and understandings of the child vary across different sociocultural contexts. Importantly, the focus was shifted from seeing children as immature becomings on their way to adulthood to a focus on children as beings and as competent actors with a social agency of their own, not only influenced by but also influencing their social worlds (James et al. 1998, James and Prout 1997, Qvortrup 1994. Moreover, by understanding children as a specific social group, attention could be directed at children's rights and the structures that enabled and restricted control over their lives (Alanen and Mayall 2001).Since these early years, the theoretical positions and central concepts in the sociology of childhood (and its place in sociology) have been, and are, debated (see, for example, Alanen 2014, James 2010, Moran-Ellis 2010). At the same time, empirical studies of children and childhoods have been burgeoning in sociology and in other disciplines. Although a full account of these developments and disciplinary differences falls outside the scope of this issue, here we want to draw attention to some of the central concepts and theoretical points of departure in this tradition that we find of particular interest for studies of c...

Dementia is a disease that brings with it various limitations in the afflicted person's communication with others. The purpose of this study is to explore, not the limitations, but the capacity of the demented person to communicate under conditions that differ from the everyday life of the care institution. Group dance therapy sessions with elderly, demented persons were video-taped and analysed with a focus on how verbal and non-verbal modes of communication were used by the participants. The ways the demented persons use body movements, free dance movements, speech and singing in different combinations is described and discussed in terms of different expressive modes, where body movements are used to substitute or support speech as well as to express thoughts, memories and emotions. The results from the study indicate that under conditions that allow for different modes of expression, the communication of the demented person can be found to be rich and varied in expression and content.

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