Healthy publics: enabling cultures and environments for health

Abstract

Despite extraordinary advances in biomedicine and associated gains in human health and well-being, a growing number of health and well-being related challenges have remained or emerged in recent years. These challenges are often ‘more than biomedical’ in complexion, being social, cultural and environmental in terms of their key drivers and determinants, and underline the necessity of a concerted policy focus on generating healthy societies. Despite the apparent agreement on this diagnosis, the means to produce change are seldom clear, even when the turn to health and well-being requires sizable shifts in our understandings of public health and research practices. This paper sets out a platform from which research approaches, methods and translational pathways for enabling health and well-being can be built. The term ‘healthy publics’ allows us to shift the focus of public health away from ‘the public’ or individuals as targets for intervention, and away from the view that culture acts as a barrier to efficient biomedical intervention, towards a greater recognition of the public struggles that are involved in raising health issues, questioning what counts as healthy and unhealthy and assembling the evidence and experience to change practices and outcomes. Creating the conditions for health and well-being, we argue, requires an engaged research process in which public experiments in building and repairing social and material relations are staged and sustained even if, and especially when, the fates of those publics remain fragile and buffeted by competing and often more powerful public formations.

The AMR problem: demanding economies, biological margins, and co-producing alternative strategies

“…In developing competency groups and working with farmers to model their farms we highlighted the openness and multifaceted nature of farming, diagramming an array of resistance and disease risks. This appreciation of the multifaceted nature of disease and AMR, and the strategies for farming within that social ecology, underlined the importance of working with, rather than ignoring, farmer experience and expertise (Hinchliffe et al 2018). Disease management would clearly need to incorporate the expertise and management practices of farmers, while investigations of resistance risks would need to range beyond current antimicrobial uses.…”

A comparative ethnography of nutrition interventions: Structural violence and the industrialisation of agrifood systems in the Caribbean and the Pacific

“…Improved sensitivity to the potential for structural violence, including self-reflexive approaches to project development (e.g. the dialogic creation of 'healthy publics'; Hinchliffe et al 2018), could help. More in-depth and collaborative research in this area might also help us to further develop and interrogate the concept of structural violence; for example, by investigating more deeply the term 'structure'.…”

From more‐than‐human solidarity to multi‐species biographical value: insights from a veterinary school about ethical dilemmas in One Health promotion

“…Given the degree to which human lives entangle with non‐human objects and beings (Hinchliffe et al . , Nading , Rock ), even as policies and programs tend to privilege human lives, people regularly experience difficulties in practicing solidarity across species lines (Blue and Rock , Coulter , Rock and Degeling , Toohey and Rock ). The present article examines dilemmas that have arisen in subsidising veterinary services on behalf of pets and their people.…”