Health, Civilization and the State

Porter, Dorothy

doi:10.4324/9780203980576

Cited by 60 publications

(41 citation statements)

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“…The name of the ultimate supercode is "cultural artifact", proposed after triangulation discussions aimed at explaining the dengue situation in Melgar and Girardot. A cultural artifact is defined for this research as a social construction elaborated through a dynamic process where several actors and institutions participate and converge and, that is embodied in specific historical, economic and social reification processes 34 . Therefore, a cultural artifact is not understood as a material object but as constructed representations to which the community attaches social meanings.…”

Section: Qualitative Data Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

An ecosystem perspective in the socio-cultural evaluation of dengue in two Colombian towns

et al. 2009

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Section: Qualitative Data Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

An ecosystem perspective in the socio-cultural evaluation of dengue in two Colombian towns

et al. 2009

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“…74 The new normal that health care workers in Canada spoke of in the aftermath of the SARS outbreaks was, of course, not a dystopia of rightsinfringing, mandated limits on human movement and expression whose result was not infection control, but the stigmatization of particular social groups who could be successfully blamed for the crisis, as Jews, foreigners, and other unwanted Others have been in the past. 75 In public health contexts, the new normal was more about border control within health care settings, and these multiple borders -e.g., between skin and air, patient and doctor, instrument and body, room and room -were to be carefully policed, not by authoritarian fiat so much as by the care and self-discipline of health care professionals. For them, the new normal was not more sinister than an era of constant glove, mask, and gown wearing (even in routine paediatric consultation) and immensely detailed new sterilization and handwashing techniques.…”

Section: Personnel and Human Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sars and Security: Health in the “New Normal”

Hooker¹,

Ali²

2009

Studies in Political Economy

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The notion of the "new normal" first claimed centre stage in public discourse shortly after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (referred to as 9/11) during a Republican Party event in which Vice President Dick Cheney remarked that "Many of the steps we have been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy." 1 This new normalcy (or the "new normal" as it soon became known) quickly came to denote an ongoing state of uncertainty -indeed, of quasi-emergency -in which the "landscape of fear" has changed due to a diminished level of confidence that the world is as safe and secure as it once was. 2 In our analysis, the new normal is a coherent set of discourses and practices that construct the world as newly insecure. It has been especially prominent in the aftermath of the various "crises" that are taken to be hallmarks of a new era of insecurity. 3 As commentators from several disciplines, but above all sociology, have remarked, the contemporary world is often conceptualized as newly and inherently insecure, and insecurity exists at all levels of existence: in biology, in intimate relations and individual careers, and in governmental and economic systems. 4 The new normal encapsulates a way of (re)constructing and responding to this insecurity, at least in the early part of the twenty-first century. What interests us is not so much the exact boundaries of the term itself (which is widely used in colloquial arenas such as blogs and in formal publications) as the parallels and links it generates across different domains: military and political, economic, and (our interest) public health. In the aftermath of 9/11, the new normal perspective served to legitimize changes to long-held understandings of the social and legal makeup of American society, leading to a general loss of freedoms and/or invasions of privacy in various ways: by inter alia allowing government investigators to use roving wiretaps; tripling the number of border patrol and immigration personnel that work the Canada-US border; indefinitely detaining immigrants; 5 and allowing the FBI to secretly access personal information about any citizen, including library, medical, education, internet, telephone, and financial records, without demonstrating that those under suspicion have any involvement in espionage or terrorism. Studies in Political Economy6 In other words, at this time the new normal became a legitimizing discourse for American neoconservativism, a point to which we shall return below.While the discourses and practices of national security have been worrying social commentators for some time, more recently the same kinds of worries have begun to reach into an apparently separate arena: public health. The study of health risks within public health and health promotion has been concerned largely with characterizing target populations' perceptions of specific health risks, with the aims of devi...

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“…The mechanisms necessary to implement restrictions on human movement have historically developed in tandem with, and as part of, state formation 17. Unlike clinical medicine and therapeutics, regulating public health is and has been tied historically to questions of governance, authority and sovereignty.…”

Section: Authority Law and The Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking historically about public health

Bashford

Strange

2007

Med Humanities

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This paper argues that analysing past public health policies calls for scholarship that integrates insights not just from medical history but from a broad range of historical fields. Recent studies of historic infectious disease management make this evident: they confirm that prior practices inhere in current perceptions and policies, which, like their antecedents, unfold amidst shifting amalgams of politics, culture, law and economics. Thus, explaining public health policy of the past purely in medical or epidemiological terms ignores evidence that it was rarely, if ever, designed solely on medical grounds at the time.

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Health, Civilization and the State

Cited by 60 publications

References 0 publications

An ecosystem perspective in the socio-cultural evaluation of dengue in two Colombian towns

An ecosystem perspective in the socio-cultural evaluation of dengue in two Colombian towns

Sars and Security: Health in the “New Normal”

Thinking historically about public health

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