Research / Themes / Health

The World Health Organization defines positive health as being a state of physical, social, mental, and spiritual well-being, and not merely the absence of disease. That definition informs geography faculty and student teaching and research on the geography of health and diseases. Health and disease are treated as products of biological, environmental, social, economic and psychological processes. They are also deeply structured by global inequalities and what Paul Farmer calls structural violence. Building on Farmer's own critiques of "the geographies of blame" that often obscure such violence, we work as critical geographers to uncover the the political ecologies and economies of infectious disease; the impact of global environmental change and global warming; the geography of health as it relates to to neoliberal globalization; and the complex historical geographies of colonialism and neocolonialism that are too often ignored in accounts of HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases in the global south. Research and teaching on health in the department also addresses health citizenship and governmentality, as well as on the use of GIS in the analysis of health and disease. Besides these topics, faculty and students research health as a question of labor, care, and embodiment in the North American context, especially in the city. We investigate micro settings like the home and the body itself as places of health and care. We theorize health, caring (as emotion and labor), and embodiment itself as geographies that resonate with debates in feminism and queer theory, but beyond them as well. Geography maintains a close collaboration with the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, and with the School of Medicine, as well as the Global Health Department and the existing International Health Program.

Related Links

"Geographies of Global Health" blog
Health Improvement and Promotion Alliance
HEALTHmap: Global disease alert mapping system
UW Department of Epidemiology
UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine
UW School of Medicine
UW Department of Global Health
World Health Organization
Centers for Disease Control
National Institutes of Health
UNAIDS
UW School of Nursing
UW Center for Women's Health and Gender Research (CWHGR)
The Martha H. Duggan Fellowship in Labor Studies