Tracing narratives and perceptions in the political ecologies of health and disease

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 RésuméAu cours de la dernière décennie, l'écologie politique a émergé comme cadre analytique de plus en plus courant pour étudier des questions de santé et de maladie, jusqu'à devenir un sous-domaine à part entière: l'écologie politique de santé et de maladies. Plus récemment, certains chercheurs ont suggéré des pistes plus spécifiques permettant de développer et orienter ce sous-domaine. A partir de travaux récents, nous suggérons que le rôle de perceptions de la santé et de discours sur la santé constitue un champ qui pourrait gagner à être analysé par le biais de l'écologie politique. Les articles dans cette section visent donc à contribuer à la richesse empirique de ce champ de recherche, en mettant l'accent sur les aspects anthropologiques et culturels d'injustices de santé. Nous soulignons le rôle des perceptions de la santé, en particulier, comme manière d'explorer comment les expériences populaires de l'environnement local souvent divergent des discours dominants sur des environnements sains/malsains, et les effets de cette divergence.

Farmers and bovine tuberculosis: Contextualising statutory disease control within everyday farming lives

“…Viewing livestock agriculture in N. Ireland through the interpretive lens of a First World political ecology adds to this research field, and provides a novel approach to examining bTB control. Examining animal disease within its wider socioeconomic context also contributes to, and develops, the expanding literatures of a political ecology of health and disease (King, 2010;Guthman and Mansfield, 2013;Jackson and Neely, 2015;Connolly et al, 2017), some of which have considered agricultural landscapes, albeit urban ones (Nyantakyi-Frimpong et al, 2016;Connolly, 2017) rather than rural , and which focus on human rather than animal health.…”

Framing bovine tuberculosis: a ‘political ecology of health’ approach to circulation of knowledge(s) about animal disease control

“…Jackson and Neely () and Connolly et al . () encourage a political ecology of health influenced by STS which can better interrogate place‐based partial and situated knowledges, and this approach has been taken up with respect to other mycobacterial diseases. For example, Neely () has researched human TB in South Africa caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis , and Hausermann () investigated the assemblages constituted by Mycobacterium ulcerans and Buruli ulcer in Ghana.…”

WHO guidelines challenged in Botswana: traditional medicine between healing, politics and witchcraft

“…Accordingly, a perspective on local health politics is needed. Recent approaches in political ecology employ a multitude of methods in order to facilitate a historical approach displaying the contingency and entanglement of different political positions within a local environmental context (Connolly, Kotsila and D'Alisa 2017;Jackson and Neely 2015). Latour (2004) shows that political ecologies often implicitly presuppose a dualism between politics and nature, thus concealing the fact that what is regarded to be 'nature' is already constructed by politics dividing humankind and the environment.…”

“…Health care interests and power relations are subject to investigation in order to critically analyze inequalities in healthy living conditions, and in access to resources such as health services. Such power relations are shaped by discourses (Connolly, Kotsila and D'Alisa 2017;King 2010). In order to compare the different positions in the field of health services, it is therefore necessary to "deconstruct the knowledge we produce as we work to understand health" (Jackson and Neely 2014: 2).…”