Re-imagining global health through social medicine

Vincanne Adams,Dominique Behague,Carlo Caduff,Ilana Löwy,Francisco Ortega

doi:10.1080/17441692.2019.1587639

Abstract

ABSTRACT The conceptual and practical work done by social medicine and global health have often overlapped. In this paper, we argue that new efforts to apprehend ‘the social’ in social medicine offer important insights to global health along five lines of critical analysis: (1) reconfigurations of the state and new forms of political activism, (2) philanthrocapitalism and the economisation of life, (3) The economy of attention, (4) anthropogenic climate change, and (5) the geopolitics of North and South.

Highlights

Social medicine, variously and broadly known as a field that focuses on the social basis of health and illness, has a long history
We argue for a re-imagining of global health in and through the conceptual work of social medicine – a task that draws our attention to the limitations of the field of global health as it is often conceptualised and practiced today
We consider five terrains in which new conceptualizations of ‘the social’ are unfolding in social theory that may be unfamiliar to some but of great use in global health. These are: (1) reconfigurations of the state and new forms of political activism, (2) philanthrocapitalism and the economisation of life, (3) the economy of attention, (4) the challenges of anthropogenic climate change, and (5) the geopolitics of North and South. We explore these terrains in relation to what we see as possible limitations of current global health work, and in so doing question what we identify to be a core biopolitical imaginary that underpins the social-as-site-of-intervention in much of this work

Summary

Introduction

Variously and broadly known as a field that focuses on the social basis of health and illness, has a long history. New social movements and new forms of biosocial activism that organise communities for social justice are able to reveal the worlds of suffering and injustice that have often been made invisible by more simplistic approaches to structural inequality often found in global health and by reference to a traditional notion of the nation-state (Schuller, 2016).

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Conclusion