Elsevier

Health & Place

Volume 13, Issue 1, March 2007, Pages 3-13
Health & Place

Bourdieu does environmental justice? Probing the linkages between population health and air pollution epidemiology

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2005.09.008Get rights and content

Abstract

The environmental justice literature faces a number of conceptual and methodological shortcomings. The purpose of this paper is to probe ways in which these shortcomings can be remedied via recent developments in related literatures: population health and air pollution epidemiology. More sophisticated treatment of social structure, particularly if based on Pierre Bourdieu's relational approach to forms of capital, can be combined with the methodological rigour and established biological pathways of air pollution epidemiology. The aim is to reformulate environmental justice research in order to make further meaningful contributions to the wider movement concerned with issues of social justice and equity in health research.

Introduction

Environmental justice research has coalesced around concern over the societal distribution of environmental hazards and their health effects. The following working hypothesis underlies this literature: health hazards are disproportionately, or unjustly, distributed among social groups, particularly the poor and visible minorities. However, after 2 decades of research, the literature has been stalled by persistent methodological and conceptual problems, casting significant doubt over what, otherwise, is a theoretically intuitive working hypothesis. The purpose of this paper is to probe ways in which environmental justice research can move forward with recent developments in related literatures, namely population health and air pollution epidemiology.

Air pollution epidemiology has come to incorporate social stratification as a health effect modifier, usually based on single variables such as educational attainment. This has occurred alongside a new intra-urban focus, whereby exposure assessment and health effects are being examined at finer (neighbourhood and individual) spatial scales. At the same time, population health has long debated, and now arguably refuted, the use of single variables to represent social stratification. Treatment of health and social status gradient has become much more sophisticated than it was in the past, particularly recent incursions using the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu. I argue that if combined, the relative advantages of these cognate literatures can help to mount a reformulated environmental justice research agenda.

This paper first describes the environmental justice literature in order to highlight its principal shortcomings. This is followed by a discussion of recent developments in air pollution epidemiology and population health, and means by which these literatures may be merged. By mounting a new environmental justice research framework, this agenda can become a meaningful constituent of the wider movement toward social justice and equity in health.

Section snippets

Limitations of environmental justice research

Amidst increasing calls for equity and social justice1 as priority themes

Bourdieu does environmental justice?

We have seen how developments in air pollution epidemiology and population health represent relative strengths: enhanced air pollution exposure classification and refined social stratification. Each separately would advance environmental justice but they can also be brought together for a reformulated environmental justice framework. What would this framework look like? It would be based on the creation of new points of contact along the health and SEP gradient; points connecting individual and

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  • Cited by (0)

    This paper grows out of an international workshop held at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. The workshop was aimed at exploring the linkages between critical social theory, health and place, environmental justice and geographic information science. The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the PWIAS for this event (see http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~buzzelli/Internationalworkshop.htm) and the participation of all workshop attendees.

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