Embodying (In)justice and Embodied Truths

Chapter 2 discusses application of ecosocial theory to analyze the health impacts of Jim Crow and its legal abolition, racialized and economic breast cancer inequities involving the breast cancer estrogen receptor, and the joint health impacts of physical and social hazards at work (including racism, sexism, and heterosexism) and relationship hazards (involving unsafe sex and violence). It also uses ecosocial theory to develop and apply measures of structural injustice, including historical redlining (1930s US government policies imposing racial residential segregation) and contemporary racialized economic segregation. The chapter additionally explains the construct of “emergent embodied phenotypes” and the different types of histories involved in disease processes: societal, individual (lifecourse), pathological/cellular, and evolutionary. It concludes by providing selected examples of how others, in diverse disciplines and settings worldwide, have employed the ecosocial theory of disease distribution to conceptualize and analyze embodiment of (in)justice across a wide range of exposures and outcomes.

Ecosocial Theory, Embodied Truths, and the People's Health

This book employs the ecosocial theory of disease distribution to combine critical political and economic analysis with a deep engagement with biology, in societal, ecological, and historical context. It illuminates what embodying (in)justice entails and the embodied truths revealed by population patterns of health. Chapter 1 explains ecosocial theory and its focus on multilevel spatiotemporal processes of embodying (in)justice, across the lifecourse and historical generations, as shaped by the political economy and political ecology of the societies in which people live. The counter is to dominant narratives that attribute primary causal agency to people’s allegedly innate biology and their allegedly individual (and decontextualized) health behaviors. Chapter 2 discusses application of ecosocial theory to analyze: the health impacts of Jim Crow and its legal abolition; racialized and economic breast cancer inequities; the joint health impacts of physical and social hazards at work (including racism, sexism, and heterosexism) and relationship hazards (involving unsafe sex and violence); and measures of structural injustice. Chapter 3 explores embodied truths and health justice, in relation to: police violence; climate change; fossil fuel extraction and sexually transmitted infectious disease: health benefits of organic food—for whom? ; public monuments, symbols, and the people’s health; and light, vision, and the health of people and other species. The objective is to inform critical and practical research, actions, and alliances to advance health equity—and to strengthen the people’s health—in a deeply troubled world on a threatened planet.

Measures of Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Gender Binarism for Health Equity Research: From Structural Injustice to Embodied Harm—An Ecosocial Analysis

Racism. Sexism. Heterosexism. Gender binarism. Together, they comprise intimately harmful, distinct, and entangled societal systems of self-serving domination and privilege that structure the embodiment of health inequities. Guided by the ecosocial theory of disease distribution, I synthesize key features of the specified “isms” and provide a measurement schema, informed by research from both the Global North and the Global South. Metrics discussed include ( a) structural, including explicit rules and laws, nonexplicit rules and laws, and area-based or institutional nonrule measures; and ( b) individual-level (exposures and internalized) measures, including explicit self-report, implicit, and experimental. Recommendations include ( a) expanding the use of structural measures to extend beyond the current primary emphasis on psychosocial individual-level measures; ( b) analyzing exposure in relation to both life course and historical generation; ( c) developing measures of anti-isms; and ( d) developing terrestrially grounded measures that can reveal links between the structural drivers of unjust isms and their toll on environmental degradation, climate change, and health inequities.

Developing critical literacy skills through using the environment as text

Through a provincially funded project, teachers in a Grade 2 and a Grade 6 class were able to develop best practices as they incorporated the environment as the teaching text for developing critical literacy skills with their students. The findings showed significant improvement in literacy abilities and foundational skills, particularly for Aboriginal students and marginalized learners. Additionally, the children in the study developed an attitude of respect and caring for their place, the environment, and for one another. Framed by ecosocial theory, this research demonstrated the children’s abilities to utilize critical literacy skills to “read their world” and take action.