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.