August 23, 2016

Deconstructing public health: a case from the Mekong Delta

The socio-political nature of disease can be silenced, especially when there is a lack of strong civil society networks and/or scientific data to help reclaim public health. Relevant and effective responses to disease can only emerge with the involvement of people whose health is at stake and through contextualised, historicised and politicised health studies.  *
March 12, 2015

Horses, bees and bodies: post-conference accounts from Lexington

Reflections from the Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) conference, one of the biggest annual gatherings in the field. This February, six of us from the ENTITLE network presented our work at the DOPE (Dimensions of Political Ecology) conference held at Kentucky University, Lexington. Creighton Connolly and myself organised a session on “Perceptions of Urban Environmental Health: Narrating Political Ecologies of Disease”, where eight panellists presented topics that ranged from perceptions on autism, homelessness, human waste and hygiene, to concepts of politicisation, agential realism and empowerment. […]
February 9, 2015

Getting to know Escher

Some thoughts on how the perfectionistic art of a delicate craftsman, can speak to the need for expression, imagination and transformation, and how these can be useful for a political ecologist. A course on social movements and activism organised for Entitle fellows brought me to Rome the same days that the Chiostro del Bramante was exhibiting the work of the Dutch artist Maurits C. Escher (1898-1972). Escher himself had spent many of his summers in the Italian countryside and in Rome, where he was inspired […]
November 13, 2014

Diarrhoea and sanitation: let’s get over “panacea” approaches to disease

by Panagiota Kotsila About a year ago, journalist Rose George gave a TED-talk about sanitation and diarrhoea in which she invited people to “talk crap, seriously” and got almost 1.5 million views. Today, after four years of researching this topic, I realize we need to question George’s speech. It is indeed a frustrating reality that she is drawing attention to: “diarrheal disease kills more children than AIDS, tuberculosis and measles disease do, together”. This is happening despite the fact that there exist ways to prevent […]