One year and some change ago, we launched Public Health is Political to create a home for understanding how health is shaped, mediated, and operationalized by the systems we live within. Around the world, we continue to experience ongoing violence through fascism, genocide, environmental collapse, and manufactured poverty among other atrocities—all of which directly impact our health.
Through this project, we have had the privilege of working with a global community of thinkers, advocates, and practitioners from Palestine to Singapore to the United States, who are pushing beyond the conventional limits of how we understand our roles within the public health discipline. Our contributors have grappled with the roots of public health’s frameworks and theories, withstood attempts to depoliticize public health, and breathed new life into how we must practice it.
As we celebrate over one year, we want to return to our namesake. What does it mean for public health to be political? Politics is not confined to elections, ideological parties, or that thing you were taught not to discuss at the dinner table. Simply put, politics is about power: the who, what, when, where, and how of its distribution.
But people do not like to talk about power, especially those who hold it. By labeling something “political,” those in power can shut down conversations altogether, insisting that certain questions should not be open to public debate. The effect is to silence demands for social change and discourage interrogations of the status quo. It also normalizes harm and violence as inevitable.
That distribution of power drives key decisions about resource allocation, whose lives and identities are legitimized, and who is made vulnerable to harm. Public health is a social contract that we collectively choose, every day, whether and how to uphold it. That social contract is mediated by power.
As Nic Subtirelu writes, “The only way around this privileging of the status quo is to acknowledge that our actions (or lack thereof) are always political, that even in attempting not to be “political”, we are still political. When we choose to shake our heads and say “what a shame” in the face of sexual assault, we participate in the political project of patriarchy. When we hide others’ or our own sexuality out of politeness, we provide political cover for heteronormativity. When we let the topic of war remain a taboo, we participate in the violence.”
We are deeply grateful to the PHiP readers and contributors who continue to deconstruct what it means for public health to be political, and who share their wisdom and questions for practicing within that framework. The status quo will not free us. This site is, in many ways, an experiment in figuring out how to use our collective skills to build truly safer and healthier societies. Public health is for and by everyone; we hope you will join us.