In Reimagining Social Medicine from the South, Abigail H. Neely explores social medicine's possibilities and limitations at one of its most important origin sites: the Pholela Community Health Centre (PCHC) in South Africa. The PCHC's focus on medical and social factors of health yielded remarkable success. And yet South Africa's systemic racial inequality hindered health center work, and witchcraft illnesses challenged a program rooted in the sciences. To understand Pholela's successes and failures, Neely interrogates the “social” in social medicine. She makes clear that the social sciences the PCHC used failed to account for the roles that Pholela's residents and their environment played in the development and success of its program. At the same time, the PCHC's reliance on biomedicine prevented it from recognizing the impact on health of witchcraft illnesses and the social relationships from which they emerged. By rewriting the story of social medicine from Pholela, Neely challenges global health practitioners to recognize the multiple worlds and actors that shape health and healing in Africa and beyond.

Bringing together the experience, perspective and expertise of Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Arthur Kleinman, Reimagining Global Health provides an original, compelling introduction to the field of global health. Drawn from a Harvard course developed by their student Matthew Basilico, this work provides an accessible and engaging framework for the study of global health. Insisting on an approach that is historically deep and geographically broad, the authors underline the importance of a transdisciplinary approach, and offer a highly readable distillation of several historical and ethnographic perspectives of contemporary global health problems. The case studies presented throughout Reimagining Global Health bring together ethnographic, theoretical, and historical perspectives into a wholly new and exciting investigation of global health. The interdisciplinary approach outlined in this text should prove useful not only in schools of public health, nursing, and medicine, but also in undergraduate and graduate classes in anthropology, sociology, political economy, and history, among others.

Social medicine, starting two centuries ago, has shown that social conditions affect health and illness more than biology does, and social change affects the outcomes of health and illness more than health services do. Understanding and exposing sickness-generating structures in society helps us change them. This first book providing a critical introduction to social medicine sheds light on an increasingly important field. The authors draw on examples worldwide to show how principles based on solidarity and mutual aid have enabled people to participate collaboratively to construct health-promoting social conditions. The book offers vital information and analysis to enhance our understanding regarding the promotion of health through social and individual means; the micro-politics of medical encounters; the social determination of illness; the influences of racism, class, gender, and ethnicity on health; health and empire; and health praxis, reform, and sociomedical activism. Illustrations are included throughout the book to convey these key themes and important issues, as well as on Routledge’s webpage for the book, under the Support Materials tab. The authors offer compelling ways to understand and to change the social dimensions of health and health care. Students, teachers, practitioners, activists, policy makers, and people concerned about health and health care will value this book, which goes beyond the usual approaches of texts in public health, medical sociology, health economics, and health policy.

Throughout Latin America, social medicine has been widely recognized for its critical perspectives on mainstream understandings of health and for its progressive policy achievements. Nevertheless, it has been an elusive subject: hard to define, with puzzling historical discontinuities and misconceptions about its origins. Drawing on a vast archive and with an ambitious narrative scope that transcends national borders, Eric D. Carter offers the first comprehensive intellectual and political history of the social medicine movement in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present day. While maintaining a consistent focus on health equity, social medicine has evolved with changing conditions in the region. Carter shows how it shaped early Latin American welfare states, declined with the dominance of midcentury technocratic health planning, resurged in the 1970s in solidarity against authoritarian regimes, and later resisted neoliberal reforms of the health sector. He centers socialist and anarchist doctors, political exiles, intellectuals, populist leaders, and rebellious technocrats from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and other countries who responded to and shaped a dynamic political environment around health equity. The lessons from this history will inform new thinking about how to achieve health equity in the twenty-first century.

What might it mean to “unsettle” our disciplinary understanding of race, nature, and the environment? This book assembles diverse voices and approaches in geographic thinking on race and racialization during an era of climate crisis, toxic legacies, state violence, mass extinctions, carceral logics, and racial injustices that shape—and are shaped by—the (re)production of nature. The volume advances new critical scholarship on race and racialization in Anglo-American geography; reflects on its uneven diffusion and unmet challenges; and notes the unstoppable force of insurgent thinking, abolition geography, critical race theory, Black and Indigenous geographies, scholar activism, and environmental justice praxis in taking hold and transforming the discipline. Together, the authors work across the vibrant fields of political ecology and human–environment geography; grapple with timely questions of land, water, territory, and place-making; render visible the spatial and socioecological reproduction of power and violence by capital and the state; and make space for the enduring politics of struggle on multiple registers—body, home, classroom, park, city, community, region, and world. Race, Nature, and the Environment will interest students, academics, and researchers in Geography who are keen to learn about disciplinary approaches and debates in relation to race, racialization, environmental justice, and the politics of nature in a world marked by white supremacy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

This open access book sets out the contours of feminist political ecology (FPE) as a major contribution to ongoing debates in the field. As Professor Lyla Mehta says in her Foreword, the book is "foregrounding multiple ways of knowing and being, thus enabling new conceptions of politics, justice and alternatives to dominant, capitalist development trajectories". In an innovative methodological twist, the edited book engages the reader in conversations that have emerged from the multi-sited and cross-generational dialogues of the Well-Being Ecology Gender cOmmunities (WEGO) network over the last four years. The conversations explore topics that range from climate change and extractivism, to body politics and health, degrowth, care and community well-being. The authors reflect on their collective learning process as they map out the new directions of FPE research and analysis. The chapters highlight WEGO transnational/transdisciplinary conversations with local communities, social movements and different academic spaces. The book foregrounds the ethics of doing feminist work inside and outside academe and brings to life the importance of doing reflexive research aware of situated historical and contemporary geographical contours of power.

The social scientific study of social movements remains largely shaped by categories, concepts and debates that emerged in North Atlantic societies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, namely resource mobilization, framing, collective identity, and new social movements. It is now, however, increasingly clear that we are experiencing a profound period of social transformation associated with online interactivity, informationalization and globalization. Written by leading experts from around the world, the chapters in this book explore emerging forms of movement and action not only in terms of the industrialized countries of the North Atlantic, but recognizes the importance of globalizing forms of action and culture emerging from other continents and societies. This is the first book to bring together key authors exploring this transformation in terms of action, culture and movements. It not only engages with critical transformations in the nature of collective action, but also makes a significant contribution to the globalizing of sociology.