Original ResearchSociology, environment and health: a materialist approach
Section snippets
Introduction: sociology, humans and the environment
The interaction between the environment and human health has been of concern to medicine since Galen's theory of humours sought to explain disease as a dialectical relationship between bodily constitution and environmental or societal hazards.1 While the rise of germ theory and a medical model of disease undermined this dialectic, the emergence of public health in the Victorian era reflected continued humouralist concerns with the effects of the environment upon health.2 The interaction between
Sociological approaches to environment and health
Social scientists have engaged variously with issues concerning environment and ecology, typically differentiating between the physical and biological environment and the social and cultural environment. Sociologists have applied a broad notion of environment as a context for social action, in which ‘the environment’ is basically everything that is not part of a human body, a product of human agency, or a human construction.10, 11 They analyzed the interactions between society and the
‘New materialism’: challenging nature/culture dualism
Despite social science's shift from exceptionalist to ecological paradigm, it has remained fundamentally anthropocentric, placing humanity at the centre of its perspective. Arguably, this anthropocentric distinction is deeply ingrained in the philosophy of the social sciences, with ‘nature’ having always been treated conceptually and politically as culture's ‘Other’.33 Historically, culture/nature dualism has been a neat way to set limits on the concerns of the social and natural sciences,
The environment and child health
The impacts of environment factors, from pesticides to air pollution to radiation fall-out, have been of concern to public health,46 including effects of road traffic pollutants on children's health.47, 48 To explore how a materialist sociology might address these interactions, consider a hypothetical policy initiative undertaken by public health staff in a UK city council to improve child health, of the type advocated by WHO.49 This initiative sought to reduce the number of vehicles using the
Discussion
Sociology has sought in various ways to explore, theorize and problematize the study of the environment and interactions between environment and human health. However, despite advances from a position that gave automatic exemption to humans from participation in the rest of the natural world to one that acknowledged humans as part of a global ecosystem,10 we have argued the need for a postanthropocentric ontology that cuts through nature/culture dualism and takes matter rather than human agency
Author statements
This paper has not been previously published or considered for publication elsewhere.
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2020, Sustainable Cities and SocietyCitation Excerpt :For example, the green space coverage (ISO, 2014; Nader, Salloum, & Karam, 2008) and public parks and gardens (City of Fort Collins Natural Resources, 2011), as environmental indicators, play a positive role in the health aspects of sustainability because when the citizens visit the environment e.g. an urban park, they also enjoy its benefits on their health (Chen et al., 2019). Besides, climate change (Ahvenniemi, Huovila, Pinto-Seppä, & Airaksinen, 2017; Balaban, 2012) and traffic pollutants such as noise (Mapar et al., 2017) as two negative environmental indicators have also negative health effects on particular groups of citizens such as children and elderly (Fox & Alldred, 2016). Also, the quality of urban environment (Chen et al., 2019) and its equality of distribution is increasingly important for human health and wellbeing, so residents with greater access to economic or social resources have greater access to the health benefits of urban environment and have less exposure to environmental hazards (Schulz, Arya, & Mehdipanah, 2018).
Matter beginning to matter: On posthumanist understandings of the vital emergence of health
2019, Social Science and MedicineCitation Excerpt :Of course, not all qualitative health researchers have been happy with this enduring arrangement, with many of them pushing themselves and others to confront the competing and often contradictory models of subjectivity, identity and agency that continue to proliferate in qualitative health research across the social sciences (see Andrews, 2014; Duff, 2016; Fox, 2002, 2013; Fox and Alldred, 2013; King, 2010). The most obvious and powerful instance of this push has been interest in the relevance of ‘posthumanism’ to advance sub-disciplinary research in, for example, the sociology and anthropology of public health (e.g. Barnfield, 2016; Cohn and Lynch, 2017; Fox and Alldred, 2016a; Rock, 2013, 2017; Rock et al., 2014); the sociology of health care institutions (e.g. Bell, 2018; Heath et al., 2018; Jones, 2018; Lindberg et al., 2012; Soffer, 2016); nursing theory and research (e.g. Gagnon and Holmes, 2016; Grant, 2016; Holmes et al., 2007, 2010; Holmes and Gastaldo, 2004; Lapum et al., 2012; Monteiro, 2016; Roberts, 2005); critical gerontology (e.g. Buse and Twigg, 2014, 2015; 2018; Katz, 2018; Kontos et al., 2017; Phoenix and Bell, 2018; Wheeler, 1998); and health geography (e.g. Andrews, 2018, 2019; Andrews et al., 2014; Bissell, 2010; Duff, 2018; Foley, 2011; Greenhough, 2011a,b). Other instances include work where posthumanism has dominated thinking in emerging non-traditional interdisciplinary fields with growing health interests including science and technology studies (e.g. Fox, 2017; Greenhough, 2006; Greenhough and Roe, 2006; Lehoux et al., 2008; Moser, 2008); biosocial and neurosocial studies (e.g. Fitzgerald et al., 2016; Fitzgerald and Rose, 2016; Guthman and Mansfield, 2013; Lorimer, 2017; Prior et al., 2018); new mobilities (e.g. Kwan and Schwanen, 2016; Macpherson, 2009; Simpson, 2017; Solomon, 2011); animal/human relations studies (e.g. Greenhough and Roe, 2011; Gorman, 2017a,b,c; Pedersen, 2010); physical culture and sensory studies (e.g. Allen-Collinson and Hockey, 2015; Fullagar, 2017; Gorman, 2017b; Jones, 2012; Sparkes, 2017; Sparkes et al., 2018); and arts performance studies (e.g. Boyd, 2017; Gray, 2017; Gray and Kontos. 2018; Kontos et al., 2017; Kontos and Grigorovich, 2018; McCormack, 2013).
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Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!
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