Health is shaped by every facet of society: international policy, economic political systems, social hierarchies, and more. Yet, mainstream public health remains constrained by a limited focus on healthcare and downstream interventions, failing to address the fundamental causes of health.
To repair what has been broken, we must first acknowledge that public health, as currently practiced, is complicit in maintaining oppressive structures. This platform exists to interrogate how power is made and reproduced within the field. The content shared will challenge the discipline’s mainstream frameworks, refusing to accept the boundaries that have been imposed on what public health can be. Inspired by abolitionist and decolonial praxis, we believe that public health must be committed to social change and political transformation.
We seek to inspire new ways of thinking in public health and provide tools that empower people to transform the social, political, and economic systems that determine and mediate well-being. This is a space to generate a different vision for public health, one that recommits us to each other, the land, and the urgent work of grasping at the roots of injustice.
Scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes, “What makes ideas ‘real’ is the system of knowledge, the formations of culture, and the relations of power in which these concepts are located.” We aim to disrupt the entrenched relations of power that have directed the public health field to colonize, maim, and harm, and in turn, make real an expansive, liberatory discipline—one that does not fear political struggle but embraces it as essential to our survival.
This is Public Health is Political.
Shivani Nishar is Co Editor and a founding member of Public Health is Political. With a decade of experience as a community organizer and policy advocate, she works at the intersection of health justice and abolition. Shivani is deeply committed to advancing public health as a transformative tool for reimagining our notions of safety and responses to harm.
Deionna Vigil (Nanbé Ówîngeh) is Co Editor and a founding member of Public Health is Political. She has nearly a decade of research experience in infectious diseases and bioethics. Deionna studies settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and US imperialism as root causes that shape our health. Her work is based in a deep love for people, her community, and all life.