Taking Back Health: Health Tomorrow, Vol. 5 (2017)
Submission Deadline: May 30th, 2017
The fifth volume of Health Tomorrow: Interdisciplinarity and Internationality (HTII) explores the themes of anti-colonialism, decolonization, anti-racism, white supremacy, and the hegemony of the Global North to reveal broader conceptualizations of health and health determinants.
HTII seeks to gather original research and book reviews that question dominant health discourses by critically analyzing oppressive colonial processes and their destructive legacies— legacies that continue to affect the health of individuals and communities.
Critical inquiries disrupt dominant understandings of health—dislodging approaches to healthcare from their epistemological, economic, institutional, demographic, and political centres. Often, this work is accomplished by making explicit the intersection of individual experiences, identities, and systems, as well as structures that interact simultaneously and on multiple levels.
Such critiques expose how health inequities and systemic injustices are embedded in conventional biomedical approaches, pathologies, and eurocentric conceptions of health and health services.
By mapping instances of health inequities and injustices onto broader socio-political territories, we can better understand the expression and interaction of multiple forms of oppression and discrimination. Critical investigations in this area have opened up spaces for challenging dominant health discourses.
Resisting these discourses also means decentering conventional health narratives, promoting emancipatory worldviews, and fostering more positive and contextualized health practices. Through destabilization, notions of health can become more dynamically responsive to context, power, privilege, and social location.
Possible areas and topics may include, but are in no way limited to:
Anti-colonial scholarship on health: Highlighting the imperialist role of the Global North in shaping notions of health (e.g., neoliberatlization of health services).
Decolonizing scholarship on health: Indigenous work to decolonize settler states (e.g. the decolonization of body, mind and spirit; Indigenous approaches to health; strategies for decolonizing health and medicine)
Critical race approaches to health: Black feminist scholarly traditions and approaches from the Global South (e.g. intersectional approaches to health; racism and anti-Black racism in medical research and practice; anti-racism work in health service delivery and distribution; the relationship between Western medicine and non-Western medicine; integration as well as resistance to Western medicine)
Critical disability approaches to health: Perspectives that dismantle the ableist policies, assumptions and practices that marginalize or disadvantage different abilities (e.g., sociologies of impairment that shed light on the effects of colonialism)
Historical or long-term perspectives on health: Colonial or racist influence on beauty and ‘body shaming’ (e.g. racist cosmetic interventions, gender-confirmation surgeries and practices, cultural appropriations of beauty standards)
Reformulations or challenges to conventional notions of health: feminist applications of phenomenology such as subjectivity, identity, embodiment, intersectionality and everyday epistemology in relation to the body; health of individuals as dependant on their communities (e.g., pressure on new mothers to breastfeed).
Please send completed manuscripts (6000-10,000 words) to htii@yorku.ca by May 30th, 2017
For further guidelines and instructions, please visit: http://ht.journals.yorku.ca
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Health Tomorrow: Interdisciplinarity and Internationality (HTII) is an open-access journal founded by members of York University. We are dedicated to publishing research that is relevant to issues of health from social justice perspectives.
HTII's Editorial Team works within interdisciplinary teams and cross-sectoral networks to draw together a range of social, biomedical, political, and environmental scholarship, as well as research from law, education, and the physical sciences. As a result, HTII bridges the divide between the sciences and the social sciences and encourages a range of theoretical, empirical, and interdisciplinary orientations to research.
