Simon Cohn - Böcker

The intellectual and moral imperatives that underscore public health have sustained the idea that its fundamental scope is the study of human health, illness and suffering, and that these are self-evidently attributable to individuals and groups of people. This edited collection explores to what extent a shift towards more posthuman perspectives – where the status of the human as the obvious focus for our attention is de-stabilised – might catalyse complimentary or alternative accounts of common topics in public health. The collection argues that through this posthuman approach, standard categories such as health, illness and even the body might be re-conceived as interactions between different entities – between people, other living things, material objects and the environment – rather than as inherently human properties. By taking into greater account non-humans and relationships between humans and non-humans, this approach offers a re-casting of traditional topics in public health and opens new opportunities for examining these. In so doing, the book raises key questions about researching ‘health’; about considering the extent to which it may be productive to think about health as it interests not only human lives; and what happens to our moral and ethical commitments if we no longer put humans first. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Public Health.

This timely volume demonstrates the power and the potential of social theory, including theories of practice, histories and biographies of disease, and geographical accounts of cohabitation and contagion, to explore how biological, microbial and social processes constitute each other.It is widely recognised that biological, microbial and social processes constitute each other, but there is much less agreement about what this means, or about how this interweaving should be conceptualised and studied. Whilst recognising that there been huge growth in more-than-human approaches and in contributions from science and technology studies and feminist scholarship, this volume advocates that more ideas are needed if we are to address global threats, including the impacts of climate change, growing antimicrobial resistance, pandemics, the geographies and distribution of zoonoses, and other large biosocial phenomena.Contributors from disciplines including anthropology, geography, sociology and public health, bring these resources to bear on fundamental questions about scale and transmission, the place of human bodies in social and biological theory, and concepts of health, risk and disease. Informed by real-life examples relating to food, insects, water and air, the spread of disease and antimicrobial resistance, the result is an agenda-setting book positioned at the intersection of research and policy.It will appeal to scholars and academics with interested in social theory, microbes, and public health, and well as academics and advanced students of geography, anthropology, sociology, medical sociology, social studies of science, and the history of health.

This timely volume demonstrates the power and the potential of social theory, including theories of practice, histories and biographies of disease, and geographical accounts of cohabitation and contagion, to explore how biological, microbial and social processes constitute each other.It is widely recognised that biological, microbial and social processes constitute each other, but there is much less agreement about what this means, or about how this interweaving should be conceptualised and studied. Whilst recognising that there been huge growth in more-than-human approaches and in contributions from science and technology studies and feminist scholarship, this volume advocates that more ideas are needed if we are to address global threats, including the impacts of climate change, growing antimicrobial resistance, pandemics, the geographies and distribution of zoonoses, and other large biosocial phenomena.Contributors from disciplines including anthropology, geography, sociology and public health, bring these resources to bear on fundamental questions about scale and transmission, the place of human bodies in social and biological theory, and concepts of health, risk and disease. Informed by real-life examples relating to food, insects, water and air, the spread of disease and antimicrobial resistance, the result is an agenda-setting book positioned at the intersection of research and policy.It will appeal to scholars and academics with interested in social theory, microbes, and public health, and well as academics and advanced students of geography, anthropology, sociology, medical sociology, social studies of science, and the history of health.

A wide range of international contributions draw on theoretical and empirical sources to explore whether alternatives exist to both conceptualise and conduct research into what people do and don’t do, in relation to their health and experiences of illness. Presents a collection of international contributions that complement, as well as critique, dominant conceptualisations of health behaviourIncludes a wide range of both theoretical perspectives and empirical casesReasserts the unique contribution social sciences can make to health researchChallenges assumptions about the usefulness of the concept of health behaviourA timely publication given the rise of chronic and lifestyle diseases and the resulting changes in global health agendas