Environmental Racism and Classism as Lenses for Health Inequalities

Are you keen to understand how complex issues that span multiple disciplines can be tackled in research? Then join this series, which will illustrate the value of geography as a connecting science, ideal for dealing with complex issues. A series of four sessions delivered across 2021 aims to provide a wide-ranging view of some contemporary issues in healthcare form a health geography perspective. In this series Dr. Hamish Robertson will range across disciplines to discuss the role of the humanities, social sciences and health disciplines in addressing emerging complexities and the value in making cross-disciplinary connections.

While the examples given will relate to health, the workshops will be valuable for researchers in many fields, studying many topics, providing opportunities to learn about working with different kinds of data, data representation / visualisation, and different approaches to analysis.

The key topics for discussion will include: (1) a general introduction to health geography and its connections to disciplines such as classical studies, religious studies, history, public health and the social sciences; (2) communicable and infectious diseases from a health geography perspective including the importance of quantitative and qualitative methods for effective management of these problems; (3) non-communicable diseases including trends such as population ageing and disability; (4) environmental racism and classism as a specific focus because social inequalities are health inequalities.

No experience in any branch of academic geography is expected for participation in this series. The mindset we ask for is an openness to different disciplines, perspectives and making connections across fields of inquiry, methodologies and events.

This is the registration page for the 4th session in the series:

Environmental Racism and Classism as Lenses for Health Inequalities

By definition, health inequalities are unevenly spread across populations and spaces. The Foucauldians among you may even say that population as a concept is about the construction and regulation of social inequalities. Certainly, perspectives such as environmental racism have had no trouble proving their case - racialised societies produce startling racial inequalities in health, housing, employment, criminal justice and so on. Planning authorities in local governments have often ‘improved’ neighbourhoods by their wholesale physical destruction (rather than improvement) and relocation of residents to urban peripheries and tower blocks. This was common for several decades in the UK, USA and elsewhere. In the US ‘redlining’ was used against Black communities and county authorities often ceased power, water and sewage access where Black neighbourhoods began. The geography of inequality and its health consequences is obvious here as well. In this session we extend the discussion of airs and waters to include green and blue space factors and their contribution to health and illness in the 21st century.

Learning Outcomes

1. Understand what environmental racism and classism look like spatially and why they are significant societal problems.

2. Learn how to unpack social and health inequalities via a health geography perspective.

3. Broaden your understanding of the spatial sciences and their utility in reducing social health inequalities.

Please note that this session will be recorded and may be uploaded as online training.