Faculty Bibliography
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Patterns of population health are keen reflections of structural inequities in societies, yet they are rarely subject to the requirements of democratic justification that other systemic inequalities provoke. Nor are health systems generally subject to societal scrutiny regarding fidelity to normative commitments of dignity and equality. Increased recognition of social determinants of health has challenged the narrow biomedical view of health as a stochastic phenomenon. More recently the sweeping devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare structural injustices across many democracies, which contributed to widely disparate rates of infection and mortality.
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Like other contributors to this special issue and beyond, I believe we are at a critical inflection point in human rights and need to re-energize our work broadly to address growing economic inequality as well as inequalities based on different axes of identity. In relation to the constellation of fields involved in ‘health and human rights’ specifically—which link distinct communities with dissonant values, methods and orthodoxies—I argue that we also need to challenge ideas that are taken for granted in the fields that we are trying to transform. After setting out a personal and subjective account of why human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) are unlikely to be meaningful tools for social change as they are now generally being deployed, I suggest we collectively—scholars, practitioners and advocates—need to grapple with how to think about: (1) biomedicine in relation to the social as well as biological nature of health and well-being; and (2) conventional public health in relation to the social construction of health within and across borders and health systems. In each case, I suggest that challenging accepted truths in different disciplines, and in turn in the political economy of global health, have dramatic implications for not just theory but informing different strategies for advancing health (and social) justice through rights in practice.