Political ecologies of health

Abstract

Emerging research within health geography and related fields is attending to the social dimensions of human health. Notwithstanding these contributions, health geography has provided less rigorous attention to the role of political economy in producing disease and shaping health decision-making. Additionally, the reciprocal relationships between health and environment have been underexplored. This paper asserts that political ecology would contribute by examining the political economy of disease, interrogating health discourses, and understanding the interactions between social and environmental systems. The benefits of a political ecology of health are demonstrated through an examination of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa.

Economic, Legal, and Social Hardships Associated with HIV Risk among Black Men who have Sex with Men in Six US Cities

“…12,13 Geographic context is also not limited to physical location but incorporates perspectives on the ways in which structural level inequities, within those geographic contexts, contribute to the production of HIV risk. 14,15 The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that economic, legal, and social hardships were associated with increased odds of HIV risks in a non-probability sample of Black MSM. We further hypothesized that associations between hardships and HIV risks would be impacted by city of residence.…”

"Bird cages and boiling pots for potential diseases": contested ecologies of urban 'Swiftlet farming' in George Town, Malaysia

“…This approach is well suited for examining the political ecologies of health: as King (2010) has pointed out, political ecology and health geographies draw on ideas of place and landscape and utilize an understanding of place as a socially (re)constructed phenomenon. As such, my focus in this article is on the discursive practices and narratives circulating through my field sites, and how they have resulted in shaping the urban landscape.…”

“…As Mayer (1996: 441) writes, disease ecology examines how "humanity, including culture, society and behavior; the physical world...biology, including vector and pathogen ecology, interact together in an evolving and interactive system, to produce foci of disease." However King (2010), among others, have challenged a lack of focus on economic and political processes, leading to the development of the political ecology of disease as a new approach in health geography. The political ecology of disease has yet to receive adequate scholarly attention.…”

The role of human awareness on the spatial patterns of the tick-borne disease human monocytic ehrlichiosis in Missouri.

“…This framework allows researchers to organize the relationship among the variables of the human population, habitat, and behavior and assess important links that may otherwise be overlooked. Understanding why these factors are important in determining susceptibility to HME is an attempt to fuse the social-environmental relationship that has in the past been considered separately (Litva & Eyles 1995;Mayer 1996;Dyke 1999King 2010Zimmerer 2007). Where many studies have often looked at just the environmental variables responsible for the establishment of disease-causing pathogens and the vectors that transmit them, this research is an attempt to consider the fusion of the social and natural environment through the scope of human disease ecology.…”

“…These experiences include sense of place and how people perceive their surrounding environment and the implications they have on their health (Mayer 1992;Mayer 1994;Litva & Eyles 1995;Mayer 1996;Philip 1998;Dyck 1999;Keams & Moon 2002;Zimmerer 2007;Smyth 2008;King 2010). In recent years, the positivism and empiricism that have embraced quantitative modeling and GIS analysis have been supplemented and even challenged by other epistemologies that consider the more human elements of medical geography (Gregory et al 2009).…”