Global Health, Geographical Contingency, and Contingent Geographies

Abstract

Health geography has emerged from under the “shadow of the medical” to become one of the most vibrant of all the subdisciplines. Yet, this success has also meant that health research has become increasingly siloed within this subdisciplinary domain. As this article explores, this represents a potential lost opportunity with regard to the study of global health, which has instead come to be dominated by anthropology and political science. Chief among the former's concerns are exploring the gap between the programmatic intentions of global health and the unintended or unanticipated consequences of their deployment. This article asserts that recent work on contingency within geography offers significant conceptual potential for examining this gap. It therefore uses the example of alcohol taxation in Botswana, an emergent global health target and tool, to explore how geographical contingency and the emergent, contingent geographies that result might help counter the prevailing tendency for geography to be side-stepped within critical studies of global health. At the very least, then, this intervention aims to encourage reflection by geographers on how to make explicit the all-too-often implicit links between their research and global health debates located outside the discipline.

Geographies of uncertainty

“…However, only a handful of existing contributions within geography explicitly reference transdisciplinary debates on uncertainty. As has been argued elsewhere, and for other topics, “at the most practical of levels, this means that this rich corpus of highly prescient geographical writing rarely appears in keyword database searches” ( Herrick, 2016, 672 ). More broadly, we argue that the relative invisibility of these promising geographic contributions relates to our failure “to develop the same kind of critical conceptual mass” that has allowed scholars in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, sociology and development studies to direct conversations on the production, circulation, and lived experience of uncertainty.…”

States of Disease: Political Environments and Human Health

“…Put a different way, such problems are increasingly viewed (or produced) through the lens of the global health field. Global health presents a normative worldview that privileges biomedical and epidemiological knowledges, views health outcomes as the sine qua non of development, and is dedicated in practice to metrics and evaluation, evidence-based programming, diffusion of advanced medical techniques and technologies, and public-private partnerships (Herrick 2016). Yet, with some exceptions, political ecologists working in the developing world continue along a parallel track, not fully engaging the new realities that global health has produced in international development work.…”

When places come first: suffering, archetypal space and the problematic production of global health

“…This is in clear contrast to the more moderate political aspirations of recent critical geographical engagements with global health (Brown and Moon ; Brown et al . ; Herrick ; Sparke ) and sociology's almost total silence in the field (Reubi et al . ).…”

“…). Partly as a response to this disciplinary domination, critical social science engagements with global health have proliferated (for a review, see Herrick ). However, for a ‘mix of scholarship, research and practice’ that claims to be ‘highly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary’ (Koplan et al .…”