Infectious addictions: Geographies of colliding epidemics

Medical geography and health geography have made significant contributions to studies of human health by addressing the spatial patterns of disease exposure, location of health care services, and place-specific processes producing health and wellbeing. Human geography and human-environment geography have also contributed with emerging attention to the body, uncertainty, and health and environment interactions. What remains understudied are the co-occurrence of multiple disease patterns, including the relationships between infectious disease and addiction. We review geographic research on infectious disease and addiction to advance a theoretical framework that emphasizes the centrality of complexity, uncertainty, difference, and care in shaping human health.

Health geographies 1: Unlearning privilege

Cultural safety means transforming systems and practices to enable different ways of knowing, providing a shift in our lens of inquiry – so that it includes privilege and advantage as well as the more common foci of disadvantage and exclusion. It is almost three decades since Isabel Dyck and Robin Kearns asserted the need to address these issues in health geography. Given the length of time that has passed since their suggestion, in this report, I pick up their challenge around cultural safety in relation to health geographies and explore how far we have come. In doing so, I highlight recent health geography work which exemplifies this individually and systemically transformative approach. I focus on how understanding and addressing privilege offers a helpful sensitising framework for health geographies and point to the barriers and the opportunities embracing this approach offer.

Bringing the “Place” to Life-Space in Gerontology Research

Understanding older adults’ relationships with their environments and the way this relationship evolves over time have been increasingly acknowledged in gerontological research. This relationship is often measured in terms of life-space, defined as the spatial area through which a person moves within a specific period of time. Life-space is traditionally reported using questionnaires or travel diaries and is, thus, subject to inaccuracies. More recently, studies are using a global positioning system to accurately measure life-space. Although life-space provides useful insights into older adults’ relationships with their environment, it does not capture the inherent complexities of environmental exposures. In the fields of travel behaviour and health geography, a substantial amount of research has looked at people’s spatial behaviour using the notion of “Activity Space,” allowing for increasing sophistication in understanding older adults’ experience of their environment. This manuscript discusses developments and directions for extending the life-space framework in environmental gerontology by drawing on the advancements in the activity space framework.