CFP: “Health’s Borders”, Health Tomorrow, Volume 4 (2016)
Health Tomorrow: Interdisciplinarity and Internationality
York University, Toronto, Canada
http://ht.journals.yorku.ca
Submission Deadline: May 15th, 2016
Borders are constructed to regulate the movement of people, resources, and information, as well as to structure and appraise different forms of knowledge. They can also be used to isolate the causes of adverse health effects, protect equitable standards, recognize different health needs, and preserve the right to self-determination and privacy.
The creation and maintenance of borders is key to shaping individual access to health services, the nature and costs of these services, the power dynamics involved in their provision, and the political categories that structure our understandings of health.
Recent examples of how the creation of borders has affected health access and outcomes include calls to ban refugees over concerns of contagious illnesses; the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its impact on the pharmaceutical industry; the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the travel restrictions that ensued; the refusing of blood donations from men who have sex with men; shifts from hospital births to home births; and Japan’s requirement that all visa applicants test negative for HIV.
In view of these heightened concerns, the fourth volume of Health Tomorrow seeks to gather research that addresses how various forms of borders in health are brought into being, structured, legitimated, shifted, contested, and crossed, as well as their implications.
Possible topics may include but are in no way limited to:
• regimes of health: health as coercion, monitoring, and control.
• barriers to access: discrimination in service provision and structuring
• borders around health professions and disciplines: “scientific” vs. “non-scientific medicine”
• legitimacy / social epistemology: who decides what counts as health knowledge?
• guarding geographical borders: epidemics, travel, and migration
• borders and free trade
• technologies that break down or maintain barriers to health services
• borders between health service providers and recipients and between institutionalized operations and everyday life
• borders within demography (race, age, gender, class, and sexuality, among other identity markers)
• borders between research and practice that require knowledge translation
Please send completed manuscripts to htii@yorku.ca by May 15th