Institute for Social Medicine and Epidemiology, Medizinische Hochschule Brandenburg CAMPUS GmbH, Neuruppin, Germany
Institute for Social Medicine and Epidemiology, Medizinische Hochschule Brandenburg CAMPUS GmbH, Neuruppin, Germany.
Med Humanit. 2023 Dec 19;49(4):752-759. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2022-012535.
The social sciences have long shown that health is not born of pure biology, empirically (re)centred the social and material causes of disease, and affirmed the subjective experiences of disease. Disputed both in popular and academic discourses, social health has variously attempted to stress the social aspects of health. Existing conceptions remain analytically limited as they are predominantly used as descriptors for populational health. This article theorises social health as an analytical lens for making sense of the relations, affects and events where health unfolds and comes into expression. Drawing on social practice theory, feminist care ethics and posthumanism this conceptual paper re-imagines how social health might be conceived as lived social practices anchored in care. Care within our framework acknowledges the unavoidable interdependency foundational to the existence of beings and stresses the 'know how' and embodied practices of care in the mundane in order to emphasise that care itself is absolutely integral to the maintenance of social health. The article argues that health needs to be understood as a verb intrinsically (re)made in and through social contexts and structures and comprised of meaningful, human-human and human-non-human interactions. Ultimately, in theorising social health through mundane care practices, we hope to open up research to making sense of how the doing of health unfolds inside often banal, patterned forms of social activity. Such taken-for-granted social practices exemplify the often overlooked lived realities that comprise our health. To understand health in its own right, we argue, these everyday practices need to be interrogated.
社会科学长期以来一直表明，健康并非纯粹由生物学决定，而是重新关注疾病的社会和物质原因，并肯定了疾病的主观体验。社会健康在大众和学术话语中都存在争议，它试图强调健康的社会方面。现有的概念仍然存在分析上的局限性，因为它们主要被用作人口健康的描述符。本文将社会健康理论化为一种分析视角，用于理解健康展开和表现的关系、影响和事件。本文借鉴社会实践理论、女性主义关怀伦理和后人类主义，重新想象了社会健康如何被理解为以关怀为基础的生活中的社会实践。我们的框架内的关怀承认了存在的基础，即不可避免的相互依存性，并强调了关怀的“实践技能”和日常实践，以强调关怀本身是维护社会健康的绝对必要条件。本文认为，健康需要被理解为一个动词，它内在地（重新）在社会背景和结构中形成，并由有意义的、人与人之间以及人与非人类之间的互动组成。最终，通过日常关怀实践来理论化社会健康，我们希望开放研究，以理解健康的实践是如何在常常平凡、模式化的社会活动中展开的。这些被视为理所当然的社会实践体现了我们健康的许多被忽视的现实生活。我们认为，要理解健康本身，就需要对这些日常实践进行审查。
