The Health of Populations in Challenging Times
Widening inequality, political-economic crises, environmental degradation and climate change have intensified problems for the health and wellbeing of different publics. The rapid rise of environmentally induced conditions, the fragility of healthcare infrastructures, the interconnectedness of economies and our entangled relations with raw materials, other species, new technologies and colonial histories are transforming how the social sciences advance understandings of public and population health and wellbeing. They are changing how we think about the nature of causal processes and the politics and pragmatics of intervention.
Scientific approaches which over determine health problems are increasingly critiqued for their reliance on methodological individualism, assumed universalism and unidirectional causation models (Frank et al. 2020); for over-simplifying the highly complex biosocial interactions between ill-health, place, culture, social structures and history (Nguyen & Peschard 2003) and for an inability to capture the fine-grained differences within and between social groups.
Responding to an imperative to rethink the relations between health, society and environment is a drive towards methodological pluralism and conceptual innovation; towards new explanatory paradigms and enhanced forms of co-production across disciplines and participating and afflicted publics.
Our approach
SOPHIC (Social Sciences of Population Health Interdisciplinary Collaborative) takes seriously contemporary challenges for public / population health and the kinds of interdisciplinary transformations needed to meet them. As a group, we take a problem-oriented and critical approach drawing largely on the methodological and theoretical contributions of anthropology, sociology, geography, science and technology studies and history to interrogate the intersecting concerns of public health, society and the environment.
Our emphasis is on methodology as distinct from method – meaning we start with the nature of the problem in question, rather than the ‘tools’ of data collection. Methodology refers to the particular ways in which researchers approach the phenomenon-in-question: how it is to be defined; where it can be located, what can be known about it and how to collect information about it. Privileging methodology safeguards against over-determining research by methods or research tools and/or privileging particular modes of inquiry (qualitative or quantitative).
Remit
The remit of SOPHIC is to advance and strengthen social science approaches in and of public/population health, with a central focus on (bio)social inquiry and a commitment to methodological pluralism and interdisciplinarity.
Topics
The group supports a range of research topics: health and social inequalities; health-environment relations; multi-species research; care and recovery assemblages; the political economy of health and welfare; global public health; health governance, among others.
The work of group members also contributes to and aligns with research across the department’s other research themes:
- Energy, Air Pollution and Population Health (EAPH)
- Health Systems Research and Analysis
- NCD prevention and food policy (NCD)
- Health Inequalities Policy Research (HIP-R).
Objectives
- To develop and strengthen theoretical and methodological capacity in social science approaches.
- To inform teaching and training in the department and institute.
- To increase social science led research applications
- To contribute to interdisciplinary applications and align with other departmental themes.
- To drive social scientific developments at institute and faculty level
- To engage in cross faculty social scientific initiatives: notably – CHASE (Centre for Health, Arts, Society and the Environment) and engage@liverpool (UoL’s methodology platform which supports research council DTPs and contributes to the NCRM (National Centre for Research Methods).
Management
The group is currently led by Professor Ciara Kierans.
Members
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