Critical Public Health 

About: Critical Public Health is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Public health & Health promotion. It has an ISSN identifier of 0958-1596. Over the lifetime, 1207 publications have been published receiving 26927 citations. The journal is also known as: CPH & CPH (London).

Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies

Abstract: Mobile and wearable digital devices and related Web 2.0 apps and social media tools offer new ways of monitoring, measuring and representing the human body. They are capable of producing detailed biometric data that may be collected by individuals and then shared with others. Health promoters, like many medical and public health professionals, have been eager to seize the opportunities they perceive for using what have been dubbed ‘mHealth’ (‘mobile health’) technologies to promote the public’s health. These technologies are also increasingly used by lay people outside the professional sphere of health promotion as part of voluntary self-tracking strategies (referred to by some as the ‘quantified self’). In response to the overwhelmingly positive approach evident in the health promotion and self-tracking literature, this article adopts a critical sociological perspective to identify some of the social and cultural meanings of self-tracking practices via digital devices. Following an overview of the techno...

Intersectionality and the determinants of health: A Canadian perspective.

Abstract: Despite Canada's leadership in the field of population health, there have been few successes in reducing the country's health inequities. There is an increasing recognition that regardless of the progress made to date, significant gaps remain in comprehending fully the root causes of inequities, including the complex ways in which the determinants of health relate, intersect and mutually reinforce one another. Calls are being made to draw on the theoretical insights of critical social science perspectives to rethink the current framing of health determinants. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the theoretical project of population health by exploring the innovative paradigm of intersectionality to better understand and respond to the ‘foundational’ causes of illness and disease, which the health determinants perspective seeks to identify and address. While intersectionality has taken hold among health researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, the transformative potential of t...

Blaming the consumer – once again: the social and material contexts of everyday food waste practices in some English households

Abstract: In public debates about the volume of food that is currently wasted by UK households, there exists a tendency to blame the consumer or individualise responsibilities for affecting change. Drawing on ethnographic examples, this article explores the dynamics of domestic food practices and considers their consequences in terms of waste. Discussions are structured around the following themes: (1) feeding the family; (2) eating ‘properly’; (3) the materiality of ‘proper’ food and its intersections with the socio-temporal demands of everyday life and (4) anxieties surrounding food safety and storage. Particular attention is paid to the role of public health interventions in shaping the contexts through which food is at risk of wastage. Taken together, I argue that household food waste cannot be conceptualised as a problem of individual consumer behaviour and suggest that policies and interventions might usefully be targeted at the social and material conditions in which food is provisioned.

Understanding health promotion in a neoliberal climate and the making of health conscious citizens

Abstract: Neoliberal rationality is frequently invoked in critical analyses of health promotion, particularly those analyses stemming from a Foucaultian governmental perspective. Such references made to neoliberalism have been beneficial in highlighting the interconnections between health promotion policy and practice and the larger social, cultural and political systems of governing in which health discourses are embedded. However, beyond referential illustrations of neoliberal ideology, there has been little elaboration as to how specifically the logic of neoliberalism is deployed in such a way as to contribute to shaping contemporary health promotion policies and facilitating the modern-day health conscious movement. In this article, I will elaborate on this issue and add a level of depth to this discussion. I will specifically explore how neoliberal thought and practice is directly implicated in shaping the way health is promoted. This analysis contributes to the growing body of literature on critical perspecti...

Theories of practice and public health: understanding (un)healthy practices

Abstract: Psychological understandings and individualistic theories of human behaviour and behaviour change have dominated both academic research and interventions at the ‘coalface’ of public health. Meanwhile, efforts to understand persistent inequalities in health point to structural factors, but fail to show exactly how these translate into the daily lives (and hence health) of different sectors of the population. In this paper, we suggest that social theories of practice provide an alternative paradigm to both approaches, informing significantly new ways of conceptualising and responding to some of the most pressing contemporary challenges in public health. We introduce and discuss the relevance of such an approach with reference to tobacco smoking, focusing on the life course of smoking as a practice, rather than on the characteristics of individual smokers or on broad social determinants of health. This move forces us to consider the material and symbolic elements of which smoking is comprised, and to follow ...