June 2016

The mouth as a site of structural inequalities; an introduction Lisa M. Jamieson A key premise of sociology is to promote fairness, justice and equity. These goals are synonymous with those of dental public health organisations throughout the world. However, an additional purpose of sociology is to reveal invisible points of observation, particularly those related to power. In the five papers that follow, we seek to contribute to the discourse around oral health-related inequalities through the lens of power and human agency. Based on the seminal work of Davis in the 1970s, Lukes’ three-dimensional power framework and Goodley’s work on dis/ability, we present a range of papers from the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand that give examples of structural power and disadvantage as they relate to the oral health experiences of Aboriginal Australians, dental school curricula and encounters in the dental practice.