1st Edition

Geographies of Health, Disease and Well-being Recent Advances in Theory and Method

Edited By Mei-Po Kwan Copyright 2014

    This book is a collection of papers reflecting the latest advances in geographic research on health, disease, and well-being. It spans a wide range of topics, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies - including anti-racism, post-colonialism, spatial statistics, spatiotemporal modeling, political ecology, and social network analysis. Health issues in various regions of the world are addressed by interdisciplinary authors, who include scholars from epidemiology, medicine, public health, demography, and community studies. The book covers the major themes in this field such as health inequalities; environmental health; spatial analysis and modeling of disease; health care provision, access, and utilization; health and wellbeing; and global/transnational health and health issues in the global south. There is also a specially commissioned book review in addition to the chapters included in these six sections. Together, these chapters show cogently how geographic perspectives and methods can contribute in significant ways to advancing our understanding of the complex interactions between social and physical environments and health behaviors and outcomes.

    This book was published as a special issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

    1. Introduction  Geographies of Health  Health Inequalities  2. Ethnic Density and Maternal and Infant Health Inequalities: Bangladeshi Immigrant Women in New York City in the 1990s  3. With Reserves: Colonial Geographies and First Nations Health  4. Smoking, Ethnic Residential Segregation, and Ethnic Diversity: A Spatio-temporal Analysis  5. Spatial Methods to Study Local Racial Residential Segregation and Infant Health in Detroit, Michigan  6. Connecting the Dots Between Health, Poverty, and Place in Accra, Ghana  Environmental Health  7. Geospatial Methods for Reducing Uncertainties in Environmental Health Risk Assessment: Challenges and Opportunities  8. Opening Up the Black Box of the Body in Geographical Obesity Research: Toward a Critical Political Ecology of Fat  9. The Uncertain Geographic Context Problem  10. Environmental Health as Biosecurity: “Seafood Choices,” Risk, and the Pregnant Woman as Threshold  11. The Mutual Conditioning of Humans and Pathogens: Implications for Integrative Geographical Scholarship  12. Moving Neighborhoods and Health Research Forward: Using Geographic Methods to Examine the Role of Spatial Scale in Neighborhood Effects on Health  13. Is a Green Residential Environment Better for Health? If So, Why?  Spatial Analysis and Modeling of Disease  14. Integration of Spatial and Social Network Analysis in Disease Transmission Studies  15. Modeling Individual Vulnerability to Communicable Diseases: A Framework and Design  16. Population Movement and Vector-Borne Disease Transmission: Differentiating Spatial–Temporal Diffusion Patterns of Commuting and Noncommuting Dengue Cases  17. Climate Change and Risk Projection: Dynamic Spatial Models of Tsetse and African Trypanosomiasis in Kenya  18. Spatial-Temporal Analysis of Cancer Risk in Epidemiologic Studies with Residential Histories  19. An Examination of Spatial Concentrations of Sex Exchange and Sex Exchange Norms Among Drug Users in Baltimore, Maryland  20. Five Essential Properties of Disease Maps  Health Care Provision, Access, and Utilization  21. Migrant Workers in Home Care: Routes, Responsibilities, and Respect  22. Urban Politics and Mental Health: An Agenda for Health Geographic Research  23. Geographic Barriers to Community-Based Psychiatric Treatment for Drug-Dependent Patients  24. Measurement, Optimization, and Impact of Health Care Accessibility: A Methodological Review  25. Spatial Heterogeneity in Cancer Control Planning and Cancer Screening Behavior  26. Spatial Access and Local Demand for Major Cancer Care Facilities in the United States  27. Patterns of Patient Registration with Primary Health Care in the UK National Health Service  Health and Well-Being  28. (Un)Healthy Men, Masculinities, and the Geographies of Health  29. Therapeutic Imaginaries in the Caribbean: Competing Approaches to HIV/AIDS Policy in Cuba and Belize  30. Producing Contaminated Citizens: Toward a Nature–Society Geography of Health and Well-Being  31. “We Pray at the Church in the Day and Visit the Sangomas at Night”: Health Discourses and Traditional Medicine in Rural South Africa  Global/Transnational Health and Health Issues in the Global South  32. Critical Interventions in Global Health: Governmentality, Risk, and Assemblage  33. Spatial Epidemiology of HIV Among Injection Drug Users in Tijuana, Mexico  34. Structural Violence and Women’s Vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in India: Understanding Through a “Grief Model” Framework  35. U.S. Migration, Translocality, and the Acceleration of the Nutrition Transition in Mexico  Book Review Essay  36. The Geography of Life and Death: Deeper, Broader, and Much More Complex

    Biography

    Mei-Po Kwan is Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A health/urban geographer with a focus on environmental health, mobility and health, and application of advanced geospatial methods in health research, she has received several prestigious research awards and garnered substantial research support from sources including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.