SfAA Panel: Beyond Environmental Injustice
Essay for the double-panel "Beyond Environmental Injustice", 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 22-27, 2021.
pece_annotation_1480700469
joerene.avilesThe article's main points cover the major challenges impeding research studies on violence that affects health service delivery in "complex security environments". The problem isn't lack of data regarding violence affecting health service delivery, but the lack of "health specific" and "gender-disaggregated" data, or data that's not completely tied to humanitarian aid.
The authors suggest several ways to increase research: increased collaboration between academia, NGO's, and health service organizations, inserting a research component in aid operations, and increasing funding to academic and aid organizations.
pece_annotation_1473624286
joerene.avilesThe main argument was that there are "biosocial phenomena" or "structural violence" that lead to the tendency for certain diseases or lack of treatment in populations, particularly those in poverty. Their three major findings were: they can make structural interventions to "decrease the extent to which social inequities become embodied as health inequities", proximal interventions can reduce premature morbidity and mortality, and structural interventions "can have an enormous impact on outcomes.
Law does more than codify, regulate, and control; it also catalyzes and transmutes, provoking cascading social and cultural effects, particularly when the force of law is informational.