Ethical Place-making Research Articles

Health Equity: A Case for Ethical Placemaking

Health Equity: A Case for Ethical Placemaking

City Symphony

City Symphony

Refugees and others enduring displacement: Structural injustice, health, and ethical placemaking

Refugees and others enduring displacement: Structural injustice, health, and ethical placemaking

A Global Ecological Ethic for Human Health Resources.

COVID 19 has highlighted with lethal force the need to re-imagine and re-design the provisioning of human resources for health, starting from the reality of our radical interdependence and concern for global health and justice. Starting from the structured health injustice suffered by migrant workers during the pandemic and its impact on the health of others in both destination and source countries, I argue here for re-structuring the system for educating and distributing care workers around what I call a global ecological ethic. Rather than rely on a system that privileges nationalism, that is unjust, and that sustains and even worsens injustice, including health injustice, and that has profound consequences for global health, a global ecological ethic would have us see health as interdependent and aim at “ethical place-making” across health ecosystems to enable people everywhere to have the capability to be healthy.

Defining Ethical Placemaking for Place-Based Interventions.

As place-based interventions expand and evolve, deeper reflection on the meaning of ethical placemaking is essential. I offer a summary account of ethical placemaking, which I propose and define as an ethical ideal and practice for health and for health justice, understood as the capability to be healthy. I point to selected wide-ranging examples-an urban pathway, two long-term care settings, innovations in refugee health services, and a McDonald's restaurant-to help illustrate these ideas.

Care worker migration, global health equity, and ethical place-making

Synopsis The division of care labor has long been gendered; it is increasingly transnational. Part of the feminization of international migration, many women seek employment abroad as nurses, nurses' aides, and home care workers. This gendered migration generates serious concerns of injustice, chief among them the deepening of global health inequities in “source countries” and injustices against migrant care workers. Here, I assume that governments and other agents whose policies and practices cross borders share responsibilities for addressing injustices, grounding these responsibilities in our nature as “ecological subjects”. This conception of persons directs attention to our embeddedness socially and also spatially, in geographically identifiable locations which are also constituted relationally. Responsibility for addressing injustices, in turn, might fruitfully be conceived as ethical place-making. Here I define the notion of ethical place-making and examine its potential to generate ethically urgent social change in both source and destination countries and their care settings.