Abstract
Abstract Political ecology has, in the past decade, emerged as an increasingly accepted framework for studying issues of health and disease and has thus given rise to a distinct sub-field: the political ecologies of health and disease (PEHD). More recently, scholars have suggested more specific avenues through which the sub-field can be further developed and focused. Building on recent work, we suggest that the role of health perceptions and health discourses is one area that could benefit from examination through the lens of political ecology. The papers in this special section thus intend to further contribute to the empirical richness of this area of study, through an emphasis on anthropological and cultural aspects of health injustices. We emphasize the role of health perceptions, in particular, as a way of exploring how people's experiences of the local environment often differ from dominant discourses related to un/healthy environments, and the effects stemming from this disjuncture. Keywords: Political ecology of health, disease, perceptions, discourse, ethnography, environmental justice
Highlights
Political ecology has, in the past decade, emerged as an increasingly accepted framework for studying issues of health and disease and has given rise to a distinct sub-field: the political ecologies of health and disease (PEHD)
PEHD builds on the established fields of health geography, medical anthropology (Morsy 1979), and disease ecology, which on their own have often proved weak in powerfully demonstrating how health is shaped through the combination of cultural, political, economic and environmental factors
We emphasize the role of health perceptions, in particular, as a way of exploring how peoples' experiences of the local environment often differ from dominant discourses related to un/healthy environments, and the effects stemming from this disjuncture
Summary
How do people perceive an environmentally risky situation? When do they fail to understand what is objectively a clear and present danger? (Auyero and Swinston 2008: 357). A new wave of scholars are beginning to recognize the increasing usefulness of PE as a general framework for studying issues of health, while suggesting more specific avenues through which the field can be further developed (see Carney 2014; Jackson and Neely 2014; King 2010; Mangiameli 2013; Parizeau 2015) Along these lines, attention has been brought to bodily expressions, the perceptions and meanings surrounding them, and the social/political embeddedness of individual and collective bodies as crucial elements in environmental conflicts. The collection aims to enrich conversations within and beyond political ecology, by bringing together articles that explore how discourses regarding public health and disease become social constructions infused with particular political motives Part of this motivation concerns the 'how and why' some claims around health gain prominence in the public sphere and consciousness, while others are discarded as unscientific or irrelevant. Before a more detailed overview of the particular cases explored here, we will turn to a brief conceptual overview of the literature on political ecologies of health and disease, and the work that we have mobilized in shaping the theoretical foundations of this collection
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