“Positive health,” “comprehensive approaches,” and “participation” have become popular concepts in today’s theoretical public health discourse. Each of these emphasizes a specific component of complex public health issues, which are at stake in
Search Results
Toward Comprehensive Conceptualizations of Contemporary Public Health
Participation as the Cornerstone of Appropriate Methodologies
Harry Nijhuis
Confronting Tyranny in a Public Health Agency
Crafting a ‘Philosophy of Praxis’ into a ‘Community of Resistance’
Brian McKenna
Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is a theory of learning and education. Jean Lave, anthropologist 2012: 159 ) Introduction In June 1998 I was hired by the Ingham County Health Department in Lansing, Michigan to ‘turn the Public Health into the Peoples
Public Health in Eastern Europe
Visible Modernization and Elusive Gender Transformation
Evguenia Davidova
Heike Karge, Friederike Kind-Kovacs, and Sara Bernasconi, eds., From the Midwife's Bag to the Patient's File: Public Health in Eastern Europe , Budapest: Central European University Press, 2017, vii–xix, 349 pp., $70.00/€62.00 (hardback
Nazi Anthropology and Public Health in Second World War Poland
The Case of Herbert Grohmann
Gretchen Schafft
Anthropologists who were also medical doctors often had a particularly active role in the Nazi regime, including the SS. One of these, Herbert Grohmann, studied under Eugen Fischer at Kaiser Wilhelm Institut of Anthropologie (KWIA) in Berlin from 1937 to 1938 and became his assistant. Grohmann, an SS officer, was sent to Poland as the head of public health in Lodz while maintaining his association with the KWIA. This article describes the interconnections of anthropology and public health in occupied Poland including the elimination (killing) of mentally ill patients, the implementation of the Deutsche Volksliste and the culling of 'racially fit' children for abduction to Germany. All of these activities are seen through the career of Herbert Grohmann.
Robin Oakley
The constitution, the law of the land of the modern state, is fertile ground for the Eurocentric imagination of the Canadian polity as a result of the resiliency of Victorian-era sentiments. The ethno-racial hierarchy contained within this political imagery merges well with the public health mandate process of 'othering'. Othering situates the causes of disease and illness in foreign bodies rather than in the social structures of industrial capitalism. Chief among its morbid symptoms, othering produces a sense of alienation in those subjected to it. Sri Lankan Tamils are one of the newer migrant populations who have been subjected to, and have resisted this intrinsically violent othering process. This article examines the Canadian constitution as it relates to ethno-racial classification, and then explores how this scheme is reproduced in common experiences of the public health system and its effects on the health and well-being of Canadian Tamils.
Social Quality and Modern Public Health
Developing a Framework for the Twenty-First Century
Paul Ward
The central focus of this special issue of the European Journal of Social Quality is exploring and understanding the utility, relevance and operationalisation of the Theory of Social Quality for public health policy and practice. In keeping with the aim of this special issue, the authors work with the Theory of Social Quality and make attempts to ground it in the reality of public health practice and policy. However, the Editorial Board stress that in the future papers will be published which discuss, critique and provide counter-arguments to this theory, in the hope of providing extra theoretical and empirical depth. In so doing, we intend to develop the journal as a place for critical debate and discussion.
The correct secret
Discretion and hypertransparency in Chinese biosecurity
Katherine A. Mason
in newspapers under foreboding headlines rife with battle metaphors. Public health officials dressed in biohazard suits swarmed airports and public events. They pointed fever guns at foreheads and whisked away those with elevated temperatures to
Forcing Things Together That Are Normally Kept Apart
Public Health Knowledge and Smoking Practice
Simone J. Dennis
In this article I examine some of the consequences of understanding smoking practice in and through an analytic frame that is closely aligned with a public health agenda of smoking cessation. The article is based on ethnographic work conducted for
Echoes of austerity
Policy, temporality, and public health in South Africa
Theodore Powers
accompanying the HIV/AIDS activist to a meeting of the Western Cape Coalition against Public Health Cuts, a broad alliance of public sector health workers, health activists, and trade unions. The drive over to the coalition meeting was short, as the gathering
Publicly Funded Abortion and Marginalised People's Experiences in Catalunya
A Longitudinal, Comparative Study
Bayla Ostrach
high-quality providers, and awareness of abortion care options – each and together ultimately determine access to and quality of abortion care ( Barot 2011 ; Boonstra 2007 ; Ostrach 2014a , 2016 ). The global public health burden resulting from