Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2119053
E. Speed, L. McLaren
The Editorial Board recently made revisions to Critical Public Health’s (CPH) Aims and Scopes. One change was to explicitly invite submissions focusing on the political economy of (public) health and to add political science and policy studies to the (non-exhaustive) indicative list of disciplinary perspectives that shed important light on issues of equity and power in public health. With those changes in mind, a recent paper by Walby, published in the European Journal of Social Theory (Walby, 2021) caught our eye. The paper considers the question of social theory as it relates to public health, specifically in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Briefly (the reader is encouraged to read the excellent full paper), Walby draws on Delanty’s (2020) review of the response of social theory to the impact of COVID-19, which identified six political philosophical positions on the relationship between the individual and society: utilitarian, Kantian, libertarian, biopolitical securitisation, postcapitalism, and behaviouralism. Walby points out that the concept of ‘social democracy’ is “curiously absent” amongst these positions. She defines social democracy in relation to public health as “a project, form of governance and societal formation, in which if one is sick, we are all potentially sick”. Its omission, Walby argues, is significant because “social democratic visions and practices underpin the theory and practice of ‘public health’” (2021, p. 24). In Walby’s view, a social democratic public health is one which offers “solidaristic provision of welfare to support [everyone]”, thus making it “both efficient and just simultaneously” (2021, p. 38). Here we see a combination of nuanced concerns around the intersection of effective governance and social justice. Critical theory in this journal has been, perhaps, skewed towards Foucauldian perspectives that position public health regimes as biopower, contributing to surveillance. There is a need for public health and other critical theorists to focus on the potential for a more positive, social democratic model of public health. In this editorial, we seek to address the question of what public health communities might have to do, to ensure that we foreground and prioritise social democratic visions and practices. Walby’s analysis raises three crucial issues for public health scholars to consider. Firstly, through the ways in which it mobilises different modes of social theory to characterise the public health response, it provides a modus for thinking about the form and function of social theory in the processes and practices of public health. In turn, this allows us to put into perspective some dominant trends – including blind spots – in critical public health. For example, through mobilizing the biopolitical perspective, Foucault is frequently invoked in critical contexts to analyze ‘state-authorized’ public health measures to contain communicable disease spread (including but not limited to COVID-19)
{"title":"Towards a theoretically grounded, social democratic public health","authors":"E. Speed, L. McLaren","doi":"10.1080/09581596.2022.2119053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2119053","url":null,"abstract":"The Editorial Board recently made revisions to Critical Public Health’s (CPH) Aims and Scopes. One change was to explicitly invite submissions focusing on the political economy of (public) health and to add political science and policy studies to the (non-exhaustive) indicative list of disciplinary perspectives that shed important light on issues of equity and power in public health. With those changes in mind, a recent paper by Walby, published in the European Journal of Social Theory (Walby, 2021) caught our eye. The paper considers the question of social theory as it relates to public health, specifically in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Briefly (the reader is encouraged to read the excellent full paper), Walby draws on Delanty’s (2020) review of the response of social theory to the impact of COVID-19, which identified six political philosophical positions on the relationship between the individual and society: utilitarian, Kantian, libertarian, biopolitical securitisation, postcapitalism, and behaviouralism. Walby points out that the concept of ‘social democracy’ is “curiously absent” amongst these positions. She defines social democracy in relation to public health as “a project, form of governance and societal formation, in which if one is sick, we are all potentially sick”. Its omission, Walby argues, is significant because “social democratic visions and practices underpin the theory and practice of ‘public health’” (2021, p. 24). In Walby’s view, a social democratic public health is one which offers “solidaristic provision of welfare to support [everyone]”, thus making it “both efficient and just simultaneously” (2021, p. 38). Here we see a combination of nuanced concerns around the intersection of effective governance and social justice. Critical theory in this journal has been, perhaps, skewed towards Foucauldian perspectives that position public health regimes as biopower, contributing to surveillance. There is a need for public health and other critical theorists to focus on the potential for a more positive, social democratic model of public health. In this editorial, we seek to address the question of what public health communities might have to do, to ensure that we foreground and prioritise social democratic visions and practices. Walby’s analysis raises three crucial issues for public health scholars to consider. Firstly, through the ways in which it mobilises different modes of social theory to characterise the public health response, it provides a modus for thinking about the form and function of social theory in the processes and practices of public health. In turn, this allows us to put into perspective some dominant trends – including blind spots – in critical public health. For example, through mobilizing the biopolitical perspective, Foucault is frequently invoked in critical contexts to analyze ‘state-authorized’ public health measures to contain communicable disease spread (including but not limited to COVID-19) ","PeriodicalId":51469,"journal":{"name":"Critical Public Health","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43515532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-18DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2096428
P. Grenfell, Rachel Stuart, J. Eastham, Aisling Gallagher, J. Elmes, L. Platt, M. O’Neill
ABSTRACT While extensive literature documents how criminalisation harms sex workers’ health and rights, limited research has critically examined how interactions between criminal-justice, health, and other systems shape support and justice for and by people who sell sex. We attend to this question by drawing on participatory, qualitative research with a diverse group of sex workers and other stakeholders in East London, UK. In addition to directly and structurally-violent enforcement practices, we identified wider, necropolitical assemblages and practices – across police, local and immigration authorities, health and social services – that disciplined sex workers’ lives, responsibilised them for their health, and defunded specialist services grounded in lived realities, amid tensions over sex-work governance. These effects – grounded in notions of community and vulnerability that often privileged residents’ concerns over threats to sex workers’ safety and health – impacted marginalised and minoritised cis and trans women the most. Those who worked on the street and used drugs, were migrants, and/or women of colour were particularly targeted for enforcement, discounted when reporting violence and impacted by service cuts. Yet participants’ appeals for redirection of funds from enforcement towards respectful, peer-led services reflected claims to social justice on their own terms. We recommend (re)commissioning health and support services that respond to sex workers’ diverse realities, with and by them, alongside concerted efforts to end policies and practices that criminalise, punish, and blame. This would help to alleviate the health and social harms that we document, in support of inclusive participation in health and broader social justice goals.
{"title":"Policing and public health interventions into sex workers’ lives: necropolitical assemblages and alternative visions of social justice","authors":"P. Grenfell, Rachel Stuart, J. Eastham, Aisling Gallagher, J. Elmes, L. Platt, M. O’Neill","doi":"10.1080/09581596.2022.2096428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2096428","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While extensive literature documents how criminalisation harms sex workers’ health and rights, limited research has critically examined how interactions between criminal-justice, health, and other systems shape support and justice for and by people who sell sex. We attend to this question by drawing on participatory, qualitative research with a diverse group of sex workers and other stakeholders in East London, UK. In addition to directly and structurally-violent enforcement practices, we identified wider, necropolitical assemblages and practices – across police, local and immigration authorities, health and social services – that disciplined sex workers’ lives, responsibilised them for their health, and defunded specialist services grounded in lived realities, amid tensions over sex-work governance. These effects – grounded in notions of community and vulnerability that often privileged residents’ concerns over threats to sex workers’ safety and health – impacted marginalised and minoritised cis and trans women the most. Those who worked on the street and used drugs, were migrants, and/or women of colour were particularly targeted for enforcement, discounted when reporting violence and impacted by service cuts. Yet participants’ appeals for redirection of funds from enforcement towards respectful, peer-led services reflected claims to social justice on their own terms. We recommend (re)commissioning health and support services that respond to sex workers’ diverse realities, with and by them, alongside concerted efforts to end policies and practices that criminalise, punish, and blame. This would help to alleviate the health and social harms that we document, in support of inclusive participation in health and broader social justice goals.","PeriodicalId":51469,"journal":{"name":"Critical Public Health","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49178616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-07DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2096429
Ryan J. Petteway
You wish to plot us and scatter our bones between proximal and distal ends of a sphere, to partition our varied flesh the way a rock might divide a stream bringing forth alluvial futures, only to be siphoned off to water fields flooded with ill logics dressed in a discourse of common sense levied with citations designed to engulf our communities with precarity, armies of statistical engineers manufacturing measures of vulnerability to be paired with pink boa scarves and jet black stilettos,
{"title":"RELATIVES//Risks or, I am not your data: Ode to Delphrine’s walk, pt. II","authors":"Ryan J. Petteway","doi":"10.1080/09581596.2022.2096429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2096429","url":null,"abstract":"You wish to plot us and scatter our bones between proximal and distal ends of a sphere, to partition our varied flesh the way a rock might divide a stream bringing forth alluvial futures, only to be siphoned off to water fields flooded with ill logics dressed in a discourse of common sense levied with citations designed to engulf our communities with precarity, armies of statistical engineers manufacturing measures of vulnerability to be paired with pink boa scarves and jet black stilettos,","PeriodicalId":51469,"journal":{"name":"Critical Public Health","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46571059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-06DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2130740
Jenelle Regnier-Davies, Sara Edge, Nicole Austin
ABSTRACT Prior to the COVID–19 outbreak, food insecurity was already a serious public health problem in Canada, impacting 12.7 percent of households. In recent years, activists, practitioners and researchers from a range of health–related disciplines, have debated the legitimacy of food banks and other charitable food programs, contending that policy and programs at the federal level must be prioritized to address the underlying root causes of poverty. This paper challenges the discourse that charitable food programs prevent or distract from Canada’s social equity goals. Alternatively, this paper argues that programs and initiatives at the local level can emerge to bring short–term stability and self–sufficiency to local communities while also advocating for longer–term structural change. Drawing upon structuration theory and critical ecologies of anti–Black racism, we examine the work of BlackFoodToronto, a food sovereignty initiative, to illustrate the negotiation of power and agency, and how groups and networks react to and reshape confining and enabling structures through collaborative practice. In addressing Canada’s food security crisis, this paper offers an alternative perspective of community–based, nonprofit and charitable programs, which in practice, can help inform future food security policy and related health equity and community development strategies.
{"title":"The intersection of structure and agency within charitable community food programs in Toronto, Canada, during the COVID-19 pandemic: cultivating systemic change","authors":"Jenelle Regnier-Davies, Sara Edge, Nicole Austin","doi":"10.1080/09581596.2022.2130740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2130740","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Prior to the COVID–19 outbreak, food insecurity was already a serious public health problem in Canada, impacting 12.7 percent of households. In recent years, activists, practitioners and researchers from a range of health–related disciplines, have debated the legitimacy of food banks and other charitable food programs, contending that policy and programs at the federal level must be prioritized to address the underlying root causes of poverty. This paper challenges the discourse that charitable food programs prevent or distract from Canada’s social equity goals. Alternatively, this paper argues that programs and initiatives at the local level can emerge to bring short–term stability and self–sufficiency to local communities while also advocating for longer–term structural change. Drawing upon structuration theory and critical ecologies of anti–Black racism, we examine the work of BlackFoodToronto, a food sovereignty initiative, to illustrate the negotiation of power and agency, and how groups and networks react to and reshape confining and enabling structures through collaborative practice. In addressing Canada’s food security crisis, this paper offers an alternative perspective of community–based, nonprofit and charitable programs, which in practice, can help inform future food security policy and related health equity and community development strategies.","PeriodicalId":51469,"journal":{"name":"Critical Public Health","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43078501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-06DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2128990
Sung-joon Park, H. Brown, Kennedy Muhindo Wema, N. Gobat, M. Borchert, Josepha Kalubi, Gaston Komanda, N. Morisho
ABSTRACT This paper examines the atmosphere of mistrust that permeated the response to the tenth Ebola epidemic in Eastern DRC (2018–2020). The concept of an ‘atmosphere of mistrust’ that we develop in this article directs attention to the elusive-yet-pervasive presence of mistrust in interactions between responders and communities during the Ebola epidemic. This analysis focuses on the popular notion that ‘Ebola is a business’. Our interviewees frequently used this saying during our research on the Ebola response to explain why mistrust had emerged, how it materialized, and against whom it was directed. Based on these interviews, we examine ‘Ebola is a business’ as a slogan that enabled people to voice mistrust. This slogan, as we aim to show, resonated with a wider atmosphere of mistrust that governed the emergency situation in Eastern DRC. In using it, people responded to their perceptions of mistrust whilst simultaneously perpetuating and extending this atmosphere of mistrust. Our analysis of the atmosphere of mistrust highlights the power of atmospheres in governing situations, mobilizing people, and disrupting structures of discrimination. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of the barriers inhibiting the collaborations between affected communities and responders, which are required to deliver effective epidemic responses. Moreover, we argue that voice and the atmosphere are important analytics for exploring the histories of mistrust that Ebola epidemics ask for.
{"title":"‘Ebola is a business’: an analysis of the atmosphere of mistrust in the tenth Ebola epidemic in the DRC","authors":"Sung-joon Park, H. Brown, Kennedy Muhindo Wema, N. Gobat, M. Borchert, Josepha Kalubi, Gaston Komanda, N. Morisho","doi":"10.1080/09581596.2022.2128990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2128990","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines the atmosphere of mistrust that permeated the response to the tenth Ebola epidemic in Eastern DRC (2018–2020). The concept of an ‘atmosphere of mistrust’ that we develop in this article directs attention to the elusive-yet-pervasive presence of mistrust in interactions between responders and communities during the Ebola epidemic. This analysis focuses on the popular notion that ‘Ebola is a business’. Our interviewees frequently used this saying during our research on the Ebola response to explain why mistrust had emerged, how it materialized, and against whom it was directed. Based on these interviews, we examine ‘Ebola is a business’ as a slogan that enabled people to voice mistrust. This slogan, as we aim to show, resonated with a wider atmosphere of mistrust that governed the emergency situation in Eastern DRC. In using it, people responded to their perceptions of mistrust whilst simultaneously perpetuating and extending this atmosphere of mistrust. Our analysis of the atmosphere of mistrust highlights the power of atmospheres in governing situations, mobilizing people, and disrupting structures of discrimination. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of the barriers inhibiting the collaborations between affected communities and responders, which are required to deliver effective epidemic responses. Moreover, we argue that voice and the atmosphere are important analytics for exploring the histories of mistrust that Ebola epidemics ask for.","PeriodicalId":51469,"journal":{"name":"Critical Public Health","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43470214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-04DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2130031
Ellie Lee, Rachel Arkell
ABSTRACT England now has a policy framework for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). This proposes a suite of healthcare interventions, some of which attend to assessment and support for those who may be diagnosed with the disorder. Others, which are the focus of this commentary, have a stated goal of FASD prevention, to be achieved through embedding activities around alcohol abstention within maternity services and reproductive healthcare. Critical engagement with alcohol abstinence advocacy to pregnant women in this journal has linked this aspect of health promotion to larger debates about risk, moral panic, neoliberalism, self-surveillance, and forms of citizenship. The new English policies on FASD have, however, been the subject of relatively little academic engagement so far. In this commentary, after an initial summary of points from the relevant literature in Critical Public Health, we take public debate about the new English policy as our point of departure, highlighting the precautionary approach, the emphasis on monitoring, and contraceptive advocacy for at-risk women. We suggest an important shift in English policy, from presenting women as managers of risk via self-surveillance, to positioning them as in need of routine management and ‘other-surveillance’ within healthcare systems. This raises more general questions about the meaning of ‘autonomy’ and ‘support’ in healthcare.
{"title":"From self- to other- surveillance: a critical commentary on the English policy framework for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)","authors":"Ellie Lee, Rachel Arkell","doi":"10.1080/09581596.2022.2130031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2130031","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT England now has a policy framework for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). This proposes a suite of healthcare interventions, some of which attend to assessment and support for those who may be diagnosed with the disorder. Others, which are the focus of this commentary, have a stated goal of FASD prevention, to be achieved through embedding activities around alcohol abstention within maternity services and reproductive healthcare. Critical engagement with alcohol abstinence advocacy to pregnant women in this journal has linked this aspect of health promotion to larger debates about risk, moral panic, neoliberalism, self-surveillance, and forms of citizenship. The new English policies on FASD have, however, been the subject of relatively little academic engagement so far. In this commentary, after an initial summary of points from the relevant literature in Critical Public Health, we take public debate about the new English policy as our point of departure, highlighting the precautionary approach, the emphasis on monitoring, and contraceptive advocacy for at-risk women. We suggest an important shift in English policy, from presenting women as managers of risk via self-surveillance, to positioning them as in need of routine management and ‘other-surveillance’ within healthcare systems. This raises more general questions about the meaning of ‘autonomy’ and ‘support’ in healthcare.","PeriodicalId":51469,"journal":{"name":"Critical Public Health","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41814902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-22DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2123733
Alexander Broom, M. Peterie, Katherine Kenny, J. Broom, A. Kelly‐Hanku, L. Lafferty, C. Treloar, T. Applegate
ABSTRACT It is now well-recognised that antimicrobial resistance (AMR), or the ability of organisms to resist currently available antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs, represents one of the greatest dangers to human health in the 21st Century. As of 2022, AMR is a top-10 global public health threat. Various national and transnational initiatives have been implemented to address accelerating AMR, and the pressure to find local and global solutions is increasing. Despite this urgency, surprisingly limited progress is being made in rolling back or even slowing resistance. A multitude of perspectives exist regarding why this is the case. Key concerns include an enduring dependency on market-driven drug development, the lacklustre governance and habitual over-prescribing of remaining antimicrobial resources, and rampant short-termism across societies. While rarely presented in such terms, these disparate issues all speak to the social production of vulnerability. Yet vulnerability is rarely discussed in the AMR literature, except in terms of ‘disproportionate effects’ of AMR. In this paper, we offer a reconceptualisation of vulnerability as manifest in the AMR scene, showing that vulnerability is both a predictable consequence of AMR and, critically, productive of AMR to begin with. We underline why comprehending vulnerability as embodied, assembled, multivalent and reproduced through surveillance matters for international efforts to combat resistance.
{"title":"Vulnerability and antimicrobial resistance","authors":"Alexander Broom, M. Peterie, Katherine Kenny, J. Broom, A. Kelly‐Hanku, L. Lafferty, C. Treloar, T. Applegate","doi":"10.1080/09581596.2022.2123733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2123733","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT It is now well-recognised that antimicrobial resistance (AMR), or the ability of organisms to resist currently available antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs, represents one of the greatest dangers to human health in the 21st Century. As of 2022, AMR is a top-10 global public health threat. Various national and transnational initiatives have been implemented to address accelerating AMR, and the pressure to find local and global solutions is increasing. Despite this urgency, surprisingly limited progress is being made in rolling back or even slowing resistance. A multitude of perspectives exist regarding why this is the case. Key concerns include an enduring dependency on market-driven drug development, the lacklustre governance and habitual over-prescribing of remaining antimicrobial resources, and rampant short-termism across societies. While rarely presented in such terms, these disparate issues all speak to the social production of vulnerability. Yet vulnerability is rarely discussed in the AMR literature, except in terms of ‘disproportionate effects’ of AMR. In this paper, we offer a reconceptualisation of vulnerability as manifest in the AMR scene, showing that vulnerability is both a predictable consequence of AMR and, critically, productive of AMR to begin with. We underline why comprehending vulnerability as embodied, assembled, multivalent and reproduced through surveillance matters for international efforts to combat resistance.","PeriodicalId":51469,"journal":{"name":"Critical Public Health","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45610563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-06DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2114315
L. Fearnley, Xiaomeng Wu
ABSTRACT During the Covid-19 pandemic, face masks became widely used and sometimes mandatory anti-infection devices across the world. While anti-mask protests emerged in several Western countries, nearly universal mask-wearing is commonly seen in Asian countries. Journalistic and popular accounts suggest that an Asian ‘mask culture’ explains the acceptance of mask-wearing and associates mask culture with political authoritarianism in Asian countries. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with residents of Singapore, an Asian city-state that implemented a mask mandate in 2020, we uncover a wide diversity of beliefs, motivations, and practices of mask-wearing that challenges the existence of a homogeneous ‘mask culture’. Drawing on a recent theoretical movement known as the anthropology of ethics, we draw attention to individual judgments and engagements with cultural norms and obligations in order to characterise how it became ‘desired and desirable’ for a diverse population of Singapore residents to wear masks.
{"title":"Beyond Asian ‘mask culture’: understanding the ethics of face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic in Singapore","authors":"L. Fearnley, Xiaomeng Wu","doi":"10.1080/09581596.2022.2114315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2114315","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT During the Covid-19 pandemic, face masks became widely used and sometimes mandatory anti-infection devices across the world. While anti-mask protests emerged in several Western countries, nearly universal mask-wearing is commonly seen in Asian countries. Journalistic and popular accounts suggest that an Asian ‘mask culture’ explains the acceptance of mask-wearing and associates mask culture with political authoritarianism in Asian countries. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with residents of Singapore, an Asian city-state that implemented a mask mandate in 2020, we uncover a wide diversity of beliefs, motivations, and practices of mask-wearing that challenges the existence of a homogeneous ‘mask culture’. Drawing on a recent theoretical movement known as the anthropology of ethics, we draw attention to individual judgments and engagements with cultural norms and obligations in order to characterise how it became ‘desired and desirable’ for a diverse population of Singapore residents to wear masks.","PeriodicalId":51469,"journal":{"name":"Critical Public Health","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44853054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-25DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2113035
Stephen Molldrem, Anthony K. J. Smith, A. Mcclelland
ABSTRACT In recent years, applications of big data-driven predictive analytics in public health programs have expanded, offering promises of greater efficiency and improved outcomes. This commentary considers the turn toward predictive modeling in US-based HIV public health initiatives. Through two case studies, we analyze emergent ethical problems and risks. We focus on potential harms related to (1) classifying people living with HIV in public health systems, (2) new ways of combining and sharing individuals’ health data that predictive approaches employ, and (3) how new applications of big data in public health challenge the underlying logics and regulatory paradigms that govern data re-uses and rights in public health practice. Drawing on critical technology scholarship, critical bioethics, and advocacy by organized networks of people living with HIV, we argue that stakeholders should enter into a new range of reform-oriented conversations about the regulatory frameworks, ethical norms, and best practices that govern re-uses of HIV public health data in the era of predictive public health interventions that target individuals.
{"title":"Predictive analytics in HIV surveillance require new approaches to data ethics, rights, and regulation in public health","authors":"Stephen Molldrem, Anthony K. J. Smith, A. Mcclelland","doi":"10.1080/09581596.2022.2113035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2022.2113035","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In recent years, applications of big data-driven predictive analytics in public health programs have expanded, offering promises of greater efficiency and improved outcomes. This commentary considers the turn toward predictive modeling in US-based HIV public health initiatives. Through two case studies, we analyze emergent ethical problems and risks. We focus on potential harms related to (1) classifying people living with HIV in public health systems, (2) new ways of combining and sharing individuals’ health data that predictive approaches employ, and (3) how new applications of big data in public health challenge the underlying logics and regulatory paradigms that govern data re-uses and rights in public health practice. Drawing on critical technology scholarship, critical bioethics, and advocacy by organized networks of people living with HIV, we argue that stakeholders should enter into a new range of reform-oriented conversations about the regulatory frameworks, ethical norms, and best practices that govern re-uses of HIV public health data in the era of predictive public health interventions that target individuals.","PeriodicalId":51469,"journal":{"name":"Critical Public Health","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2022-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47982581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-03DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2022.2107486
Ryan J. Petteway
ABSTRACT This commentary reflects upon power-knowledge dynamics and matters of epistemic, procedural, and distributive justice that undergird epidemiological knowledge production related to racial health inequities in the U.S. Grounded in Foucault’s power-knowledge concepts—“objects”, “ritual”, and “the privileged”—and guided by Black feminist philosopher Kristie Dotson’s conceptualization of epistemic violence, it critiques the dominant positivist, reductionist, and extractivist paradigm of epidemiology, interrogating the settler-colonial and racial-capitalist nature of the knowledge production/curation enterprise. The commentary challenges epidemiology’s affinity for epistemological, procedural, and methodological norms that effectively silence/erase community knowledge(s) and nuance in favor of reductionist empirical representations/re-presentations produced by researchers who, often, have never stepped foot inside the communities they aver to model. It also expressly names the structurally racist reality of a “colorblind” knowledge production/curation system controlled by White scholars working from/for an invisibilized White scientific gaze. In this spirit, this commentary engages the public health critical race praxis principle of “disciplinary self-critique”, illuminating the inherent contradictions of a racial health equity discourse that fails to interrogate the racialized power dynamics underlying its knowledge production enterprise. In doing so, this commentary seeks to (re)frame and invite discourse regarding matters of epistemic violence and (re)colonization as manifest/legible within epidemiology research, suggesting that the structural racism embedded within – and perpetuated through – our collective work must be addressed to advance antiracist and decolonial public health futures. In this regard, I suggest the value of engaging poetry as praxis—as mode of knowledge production/expression to “center the margins” and offer counternarratives to epidemiology’s epistemic violence.
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