Public Health Liberation: Summary
This is a brief summary of our manuscript written at a ninth-grade reading level. Perplexity AI translated.
Public Health Liberation (PHL) is a new approach to public health that aims to achieve health equity. The authors argue that the "public health economy" as a single analytic lens elucidates the contradictions and tensions that reproduce vast health inequity. The authors draw upon leadership experiences with contemporary issues and community perspectives, making this discussion relatable to non-academicians and bridging academic and popular discourse. Black women constitute a majority of the paper's authors.
The authors begin by describing their background in public health advocacy and by demonstrating the need for PHL using lead-contaminated water crises from Flint, Michigan and Washington, DC. They discuss the benefits of horizontal and vertical integration that broaden public health discourse to include affected populations and that seek opportunities throughout the public health economy.
PHL unifies worldviews, theories, practice, training, and research for a cogent approach to elucidate motivations and operations within the public health economy. Its significant contribution of liberation and African American philosophy to public health theory is highly innovative. The narrative on current events and inclusion of community voices makes this discussion relatable to non-academicians and bridges academic and popular discourse.
The authors use their ethical and theoretical assumptions to guide practice and community self-help. Several new constructs emerge that do not appear elsewhere in the literature - Gaze of the Enslaved, Morality Principle, liberation, illiberation, liberation safe spaces, public health realism, and hegemony. The authors synthesize wide-ranging theories and establish the centrality of liberation as both a state of consciousness and means to achieve health equity.
The public health economy is explained in rich theoretical detail using novel theory-building - Theory of Health Inequity Reproduction, public health realism, and hegemony - that elucidates public health contradictions and tensions. The theories provide a blueprint to communities for effective self-advocacy. The final sections on PHL praxis, research, and training further support the need for a new transdiscipline and showcase the authors’ work in applied PHL theory.
PHL presents a major challenge to assumptions about public health effectiveness in addressing vast health inequity. The authors argue that recognizing and recovering from the legacy of historical trauma remain a salient public health issue and a major philosophical cornerstone of their work. Recovering from historical trauma necessarily requires recasting a de-hegemonized historical narrative, uncovering untold histories and culture, seeking to restore personhood and peoplehood in the present through cultural regeneration, education, and liberation space-making, integrating historical trauma and personhood restoration into our own academic studies and career, and leveraging the past to educate others in the public health economy about the legacy of historical trauma and linkages to contemporary forms of violence that have evolved from it.
