What is public health? To some, it is about drains, water, food and housing, all requiring engineering and expert management. To others, it is the State using medicine or health education and tackling unhealthy lifestyles. This book argues that public health thinking needs an overhaul, a return to and modernisation around ecological principles. Ecological Public Health thinking, outlined here, fits the twenty-first century’s challenges. It integrates what the authors call the four dimensions of existence: the material, biological, social and cultural aspects of life. Public health becomes the task of transforming the relationship between people, their circumstances and the biological world of nature and bodies. For Geof Rayner and Tim Lang, this is about facing a number of long-term transitions, some well recognized, others not. These transitions are Demographic, Epidemiological, Urban, Energy, Economic, Nutrition, Biological, Cultural and Democracy itself. The authors argue that identifying large scale transitions such as these refocuses public health actions onto the conditions on which human and eco-systems health interact. Making their case, Rayner and Lang map past confusions in public health images, definitions and models. This is an optimistic book, arguing public health can be rescued from its current dilemmas and frustrations. This century’s agenda is unavoidably complex, however, and requires stronger and more daring combinations of interdisciplinary work, movements and professions locally, nationally and globally. Outlining these in the concluding section, the book charts a positive and reinvigorated institutional purpose.
The second edition of this widely used text has been carefully rewritten to ensure that it is up-to-date with cutting-edge debates, evidence, and policy changes. Since the book's initial publication, there has been an expansion of interest in disability in the social sciences, and disability has come to play an increasingly prominent role in political debates. The new edition takes account of all these developments, and also gives greater emphasis to global issues in order to reflect the increasing and intensifying interdependence of nation states in the twenty-first century. The authors examine, amongst other issues,the changing nature of the concept of disability, key debates in the sociology of health and illness, the politicisation of disability, social policy, and the cultural and media representation of disability. As well as providing an excellent overview of the literature in the area, the book develops an understanding of disability that has implications for both sociology and society. The second edition of Exploring Disability will be indispensable for students across the social sciences, and in health and social care, who really want to understand the issues facing disabled people and disabling societies.
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