Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health (Small Books Big Ideas in Population Health)

From public health luminary Nancy Krieger comes a revolutionary way of addressing health justice and the embodied truths of lived experience. Since the 1700s, fierce debates in medicine and public health have centered around whether sources of ill health can be attributed to either the individual or the surrounding body politic. But what if instead health researchers measure--and policies address--how people biologically embody their societal and ecological context? Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health represents a daring new foray into analyzing how population patterns of health reveal the intersections of lived experience and biology in historical context. Expanding on Nancy Krieger's original ecosocial theory of disease distribution, this volume lays new theoretical groundwork about embodiment and health justice through concrete and novel examples involving pathways such as workplace discrimination, relationship abuse, Jim Crow, police violence, pesticides, fracking, green space, and climate change. It offers a crucial counterargument to dominant biomedical and public health narratives attributing causality to either innate biology or decontextualized health behaviors and provides a key step forward towards understanding and addressing the structural drivers of health inequities and health justice. Bridging insights from politics, history, sociology, ecology, biology, and public health, Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health presents a bold new framework to transform biomedical and population health thinking, practice, and policies and to advance health equity across a deeply threatened planet. This book employs the ecosocial theory of disease distribution to combine critical political and economic analysis with a deep engagement with biology, in societal, ecological, and historical context. It illuminates what embodying (in)justice entails and the embodied truths revealed by population patterns of health. Chapter 1 explains ecosocial theory and its focus on multilevel spatiotemporal processes of embodying (in)justice, across the lifecourse and historical generations, as shaped by the political economy and political ecology of the societies in which people live. The counter is to dominant narratives that attribute primary causal agency to people’s allegedly innate biology and their allegedly individual (and decontextualized) health behaviors. Chapter 2 discusses application of ecosocial theory to analyze: the health impacts of Jim Crow and its legal abolition; racialized and economic breast cancer inequities; the joint health impacts of physical and social hazards at work (including racism, sexism, and heterosexism) and relationship hazards (involving unsafe sex and violence); and measures of structural injustice. Chapter 3 explores embodied truths and health justice, in relation to: police violence; climate change; fossil fuel extraction and sexually transmitted infectious disease: health benefits of organic food—for whom? ; public monuments, symbols, and the people’s health; and light, vision, and the health of people and other species. The objective is to inform critical and practical research, actions, and alliances to advance health equity—and to strengthen the people’s health—in a deeply troubled world on a threatened planet. "Is it a mystery that people subjected to economic deprivation, discrimination, and hazardous working and living conditions, compounded by histories of enslavement and colonization, typically have worse health, worse health care, and die younger than people with economic, social, and legal privileges? It shouldn't be. Observations about associations between societal power, position and health status, that is, the societal patterning of population health, appear in the earliest known medical writings, dating back several millennia - e.g., in texts from the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese civilizations, to name a few . Systematic documentation of such associations was also central to many of the founding reports, in the mid-19th century, of the field of public health in Europe and the Americas"-- Provided by publisher cover Series Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People’s Health Copyright Dedication Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1. From Embodying Injustice to Embodying Equity: Embodied Truths and the Ecosocial Theory of Disease Distribution 2. Embodying (In)justice and Embodied Truths: Using Ecosocial Theory to Analyze Population Health Data 3. Challenges: Embodied Truths, Vision, and Advancing Health Justice Notes Index Drawing on an array of novel examples such as workplace discrimination, relationship abuse, Jim Crow, climate change, and pesticides, Nancy Krieger argues for a more expansive understanding of how humans biologically embody our societal and ecological contexts