While it is often assumed to be a characteristic of individuals, health is, in many ways, a global production, emergent at the nexus of political and economic interests.
The political and economic dimensions of health and wellbeing run much deeper than the life chances of individuals, or even the aggregate well-being of particular societies. Instead, they include different flows of capital, adjudications of value, avenues of profit-making, forms of care, mechanisms of accountability, and temporalities of perceptibility that vary across the local to global scale.
All of these dimensions variously interact in producing health and wellbeing for some, while undermining it for others. Looking beyond individual’s experiences of illness, in the ‘Politics of Economies of Health and Wellbeing’ theme our researchers foreground the connections between health and its global political and economic dimensions to reimagine what health and wellbeing mean - individually, collectively and planetarily.Ìý
While health is often attributed to supposed biological differences based on racial or ethnic status, we consider the relationship between race, ethnicity, and health across various social contexts, exploring how social, economic, political, and environmental factors contribute to disparities in health and become biologised.
Within the ‘Race, Ethnicity and the Biohumanities’ theme our researchers draw on critical scholarship to examine a broad and often-amorphous arena that encompasses efforts in (and relays between) the biological sciences, clinical medicine and public health, the pharmaceutical industry, and patient and community-based advocacy to address minority health and illness.
Taking a biohumanities approach—which foregrounds humanities and social sciences perspectives on the contours of biological life—our concern is to map how poor health is linked to forms of racism, inequality, and structural violence.
Our individual and collective wellbeing are increasingly compromised by the indelible effects of human activity, past and present. From the micro-scale of novel pathogens and ‘forever’ chemicals, to challenges brought by environmental degradation at the planetary scale – the conditions of living in theÌýAnthropoceneÌýleave enduring traces in and on bodies across time, place and scale.Ìý
Within the ‘Embodying theÌýAnthropocene’ theme, our researchers are developing innovative scholarship that examines the dynamic interplay between bodies - human, non-human, geological, aqueous, social and political – amidst the various tensions that characterise our current historical moment.Ìý
In areas ranging from nanotechnology and vaccine development to human-microbial relations in everyday life, we examine how human and non-human bodies are variously drawn into relations with each other, with institutions, with the social and economic order, and with built and natural environments. We work to highlight the political and ethical stakes behind these entanglements, and how they embody not only specific ideas ofÌýhealth and wellbeing, but the broader conditions of human and more-than-human flourishing, too.
Health and wellbeing are deeply embedded in the multiple dimensions of ‘welfare’ across place and setting, which include, but extend well beyond, the formalised welfare state.
Welfare, in the broadest sense, refers to the wellbeing of individuals, families and communities, but it also necessarily denotes the institutional structures (i.e. social security, housing, education, employment) through which it is shaped.
Within the ‘Work, Education and Welfare’ theme, our researchers use sociological, political science and anthropological approaches as well as the specialist techniques of policy, governance, regulation and administrative analysis, to focus on the critical analysis of the multifarious institutions of work, education and welfare, including, but not limited to: informal care; formal employment and working conditions; state-provided and marketised income assistance; formal education (including early childhood, schools, and the technical and higher education levels); public and private housing; and, how these spheres intersect with community health and wellbeing.
Food is not merely a bare necessity, required to sustain life, it is fundamentally social. How it is grown, produced, and manufactured; how it is processed, transported, and distributed; how it is ‘made safe’ and variously ‘made available’; how it is selected, prepared and consumed; and the pervasive paradoxes of access and excess all include a wide range of social, economic and political dimensions.
Within the ‘Social Life of Food and Nourishment’ theme, we examine food and nourishment in their full social contexts and from a multidisciplinary perspective at the intersections of the economy, environment, culture, and politics. If we look closely, the social life of food and nourishment tells an evolving story, inclusive of, but not limited to: accelerating inequality, multispecies dilemmas, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, geopolitical tensions, global financial incentives and much more.
Food can be seen as a broad-based social issue, in and of itself. But it can also serve as a useful lens through which to examine and address some of the most pressing social problems facing our world, today.
Migration isÌýcentral to social life and societal organisation. Yet it is also regularly framed as one of the greatest challenges of the 21stÌýcentury. As concurrent global refugee ‘crises’, environmental disasters, public health threats and international labour shortages place migration on local, national and international agendas, questions of migration, im/mobility and belonging have never been more pertinent.
Within this theme, our researchers are developing innovative scholarship that explores the complexities of migration as a socio-political and mediatised phenomenon. Centring the social, political, economic and environmental structures that variously necessitate, encourage and constrain migration, we highlight marked disparities in access to movement and explore their embeddedness in broader systems of inequality and injustice.
Our work in this theme also takes seriously the relational, affective and ecological aspects of migration and resettlement. This focus draws attention toÌýthe complexÌýentanglements of care and interdependency, biographies and bodies, policies and practices that shape and structure im/mobility, co-construct and obstruct belonging, and enhance and inhibit health and wellbeing within and across borders.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are reshaping various facets of social life, with profound implications across healthcare, education, employment, and government. The advancement of AI-enhanced systems, from social robots to chatbots, has been heralded as a solution to complex societal issues, from diseases to terrorism. Yet, AI’s problems are emerging as fast as its benefits, including algorithmic biases and harms like unequal access to automated caregiving systems, medical misdiagnoses, discriminatory hiring algorithms, and misinformation spread by generative models.
This research theme investigates the roles of AI in social life, critically analysing both its transformative potential and the socio-cultural risks and challenges it presents. For this, a critical AI social science is vital for investigating how AI systems are imagined, designed, deployed, as well as their resulting social impacts. Social sciences are essential for ensuring AI technologies deliver positive sociocultural, environmental, and economic outcomes. This theme brings together sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, social policy, political science, and education. Through such an interdisciplinary lens, we seek to uncover how AI can be harnessed to support a healthier, more just society, fostering informed, transparent, fair, and accountable public policies and practices that mitigate sociotechnical risks while maximizing societal benefits.
Children and young people are frequently recognised as ‘the future’. Yet the realities that people faced and face while young, which include varied threats to health and wellbeing, are often dismissed or made invisible.Ìý
Within the ‘Young people, in/visibility and societal futures’ theme, our researchers take social science-informed approaches to both the experiences of young people – the challenges they face and their strengths – and the ways in which these are perceived and responded to socially, institutionally, and intergenerationally. Our researchers also study how these experiences reverberate throughout one’s life and across families and communities. This framing further informs research on what a study of young people’s experiences can offer to our understandings of broader environmental, economic, and social issues.
In asking how young people’s health and wellbeing are shaped by broader power structures and social forces, we also ask how, going forward, we could better support, value, and engage with young people in a variety of settings, including healthcare, education, and research and policy.
