Objective: This is our second of three meetings. Our overall objective is to produce a collaborative short article aimed at a relevant Scandinavian journal, to focus on reframing health inequities for the Scandinavian context.

Rethinking the Category of the Social: a problem space

Precisely how the category of the ‘social’ has been employed as a means to understand health inequity is a matter of increasing concern. Normatively, depicted as discrete, preestablished, unidimensional, standardizable, objective, and, therefore, measurable (particularly within public health and medicine as determinants of inequity of health), the ‘social’ has been considered weakly conceptualized and largely an artifact of method, resting too heavily on descriptive and static approaches of social processes and social relations. How we categorize the ‘social’ has consequences for our understanding of social inequity in health. Through it we can behaviorize or stigmatize or challenge regimes of power and structural violence.

In our Dialogues II meeting, we discuss our respective disciplinary and/or interdisciplinary orientations to the ‘social’.

• What is it?
• Where can we find it and where are our entry points?
• What constitutes knowledge about it?
• What challenges do our orientation to the ‘social’ present for us?
• Does the social require a reframing to understand and care for health inequities (human or more-than-human)?
• What does such a reframing require?

Programme of the day

• Coffee from 9.45
• Short introduction to the meeting
• Small group discussion
• Plenary discussion
• Lunch from 12.15

Preparation

None. However, we will send some articles where recent debates have taken place. We will also set up a Sharepoint site to aid curricula or reference building, so feel free to send us anything you think might be of value.

Participation - Registration required

To attend, please contact Jes Bak Sørensen at jesbso@aias.au.dk by 17 March 2024. Spaces are limited.

Organisers

The AIAS-PIREAU fellows: 

• Andrew James Latham, AIAS and Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University, 
• Ciara Kierans, AIAS and Department of Public Health, Policy & Systems, University of Liverpool, UK, 
• Jes Bak Sørensen, AIAS and DEFACTUM, Region Midtjylland (Central Denmark Region), and
• Luseadra McKerracher, Department of Public Health, Aarhus University.

First Dialogue meeting, 28 November 2023: 
https://aias.au.dk/events/show/artikel/aias-pireau-meetings-on-inequalities