Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives offers a radical rethinking of the field by unsettling conventional ideas of mobility and borders to highlight the ways in which they produce health inequalities. Covering a wide range of topics, the text provides insight through a critical lens, and proposes areas for intervention along with an added emphasis on the need for future research to address the health inequities that affect migrants. It illustrates how a critical perspective can deepen our understanding of the relationship between migration and health, which remains a defining global issue of our century.
The text employs a critical approach to examine the structural conditions of inequality and larger historical and political processes, recognizing that exclusionary bordering practices increasingly occur away from physical points of entry. It posits the concept of migration as complex, tangled and multi-directional and underscores how migrant vulnerability can shape the lives of people in wider communities. Furthermore, it acknowledges diverse and intersectional standpoints, as well as shifting spatial and temporal influences. Chapters include coverage of health in transit; healthcare access and utilization; clinical encounters; communicable disease; labor and occupational health; gender and sexuality; immigration enforcement, detention, deportation; and the effects of forced displacement on refugee and asylum-seeker health.
The text is useful for students and scholars of migration or health disparities seeking to understand how the two issues can be approached in a more holistic and critical way. It is further aimed at practitioners and policymakers who are interested in gaining familiarity with the structural conditions of inequality along with the larger historical and political processes that influence contemporary migration patterns.
Biography
Dr. Heide Castañeda is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. Her research areas include critical border studies, political and legal anthropology, medical anthropology, migration, migrant health, and citizenship, focusing on the U.S./Mexico border, Mexico, Germany, and Morocco.
“Overall, the book seeks to fill a void in the literature concerning migrant health, offering crucial insights into the structural determinants as “root causes” of health inequities. It serves as an important resource for both experts and lay readers. Its broad range of topics can be of interest to social scientists, policy makers, and clinicians. It can also be useful for field workers in the humanitarian aid sector.”
-Dr Chrysovalantis Papathanasiou, International Society of Critical Health Psychology Blog
