CANCELLED


GRASP Seminar
If you are a current or potential graduate student at York University with an interest in public health, welcome to the Graduate Research Association of Students in Public Health.

February 2, 2011
11 AM

203A Bethune College        

Dr. Dennis Raphael
School of Health Policy and Management

Reducing social and health inequalities requires building social and political movements

ABSTRACT
Health inequalities are an outcome of social inequalities and both result from the
workings of the economic system, a governmental apparatus that maintains or
reinforces these inequalities, and a public discourse that justifies these
inequalities. The outcome of these processes is a skewed distribution of
exposures among the population to various social (societal) determinants of
health. Modifying these societal processes—thereby improving the social
determinants of health—requires developing and implementing public policies
consistent with reducing these inequalities. Two viewpoints dominate discussions
of how this might be brought about: a) professionally-oriented rational or
knowledge-based approaches and b) social and political movement-based
materialist or political economy-oriented approaches. In political economies
dominated by business interests such as those seen in Canada, the US, and UK,
adopting a social and political movement-based approach is the most
appropriate avenue of action. How this might be accomplished requires critical
analysis of the political, economic, and social forces that lead jurisdictions to
implement policies that either support or resist equity-oriented public policy
innovations.