Discrimination and health inequalities

Date: 21 October 2025
Time: 12:30 - 2pm
Location: Sociology Seminar Room 

The goal of this review to sketch an analysis of discrimination as a “micro” mechanism responsible for the generation of “macro” health inequalities between groups. 

To this purpose, the “social stress” model common in medical sociology is reframed as a macro-micro-macro explanation following the canon of Analytical Sociology. The study reaches two main recommendations for future research in this area. 

First, we need to rethink the current focus on perceived discrimination. Discriminatory practices can harm the health of the discriminated person independently from any perceptions. Second, we need to be wary of overmedicalizing the psychological harm that discrimination causes to its victims. Discriminatory practices can provoke forms of severe emotional distress that have nothing to do with psychiatric disorder.

Speaker biography:
Martin Aranguren (PhD, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2014) is a sociologist affiliated to the Centre de recherche sur les inégalités sociales of Sciences Po Paris. He studied philosophy, sociology and other social sciences in several countries, including Argentina, France, Germany and India. He wrote his dissertation on a neglected chapter of the theory of action, the analysis of emotional behaviour. 

After joining the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique as a full-time researcher, he launched a program on discriminatory practices in everyday interactions based on field experiments. He wrote his HDR (a sort of second thesis needed to apply for promotion in France) on discrimination as a mechanism of health inequalities. 

His work has been published in outlets such as the British Journal of Sociology, the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He is currently preparing a solicited piece for the Annual Review of Sociology on discrimination and health inequalities. 

During October 2025, he is at the Department of Sociology of the University of Cambridge as a visiting scholar.

Access note: Historic building. The seminar room is accessed via two flights of steps/a lift and then a further two flights of stairs accessed through a heavy set of doors. There is no step-free access. The lift is not accessible to wheelchair users, but may assist with other mobility issues.