Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health

Nancy Krieger

Sep 2021 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

From public health luminary Nancy Krieger comes a revolutionary way of addressing health justice and the embodied truths of lived experience. Since the 1700s, fierce debates in medicine and public health have centered around whether sources of ill health can be attributed to either the individual or the surrounding body politic. But what if instead health researchers measure--and policies address--how people biologically embody their societal and ecological context? Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health represents a daring new foray into analyzing how population patterns of health reveal the intersections of lived experience and biology in historical context. Expanding on Nancy Krieger's original ecosocial theory of disease distribution, this volume lays new theoretical groundwork about embodiment and health justice through concrete and novel examples involving pathways such as workplace discrimination, relationship abuse, Jim Crow, police violence, pesticides, fracking, green space, and climate change. It offers a crucial counterargument to dominant biomedical and public health narratives attributing causality to either innate biology or decontextualized health behaviors and provides a key step forward towards understanding and addressing the structural drivers of health inequities and health justice. Bridging insights from politics, history, sociology, ecology, biology, and public health, Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health presents a bold new framework to transform biomedical and population health thinking, practice, and policies and to advance health equity across a deeply threatened planet.

About the author

Nancy Krieger, PhD, is Professor of Social Epidemiology and American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and Director of the HSPH Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender, and Health. She is an internationally recognized social epidemiologist with a background in biochemistry, philosophy of science, and history of public health. In 2004, she became an ISI highly cited scientist and has over thirty years of activism involving social justice, science, and health.