Obesity, the alternative food movement, and complete streets: new forms of “patient” activism and the evolution of health social movements

The study of health social movements, in the United States in particular, as a special category or class of social movements has matured over the last ten years. Spurred by theoretical and empirical advancements introduced by Brown University’s Contested Illness Research Group (Brown et al. 2012 ), work in the fi eld has drawn variously from the sociology of health and illness, social studies of science and, of course, social movements scholarship. Brown and colleagues initially focused on movements that arose to challenge dominant understandings of illnesses by insisting on greater attention to possible environmental causes. This research included analyses of activism around conditions such as asthma, breast cancer, and Gulf War Illnesses (Brown et al. 2003 ; McCormick et al. 2003 ; Zavestoski et al. 2002 ) while also developing a theoretical framework for “embodied health movements” using concepts such as the Dominant Epidemiological Paradigm (Brown et al. 2004 ; Zavestoski et al. 2004 ).