Posthumanist critique and human health: how nonhumans (could) figure in public health research

Abstract

This paper uses bibliometric analysis and critical discourse analysis to explore the rise in research involving nonhumans in public health, and the potential contribution of posthumanist social theory to this growing body of public health scholarship. There has been a sudden and rather marked increase in research and writing on animals, zoonoses and/or the ‘One-health’ paradigm within public health journals since 2006. Indeed ‘One-health’ rather than ‘posthumanism’ holds together research involving nonhumans of various kinds – from viruses to animals – within the discipline. Advocates of the ‘One-health’ paradigm argue that human and animal health must be integrated through joining the research, training and care practices of human and animal medicine. By mapping the terrain of public health research involving non-human species, we consider how and where posthumanist theory could be productively drawn upon to contribute to both critical and applied research involving nonhumans within public health. We specifically ask how the posthumanist insight to ‘follow the nonhumans’ would raise new questions and analytics for this research area.

Keywords:

• Posthumanism
• nonhumans
• animals
• One-health
• bibliometric analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sara Cooper and the other organizers of the conference ‘25 Years of Public Health Criticism: Critique and Nostalgia in Public Health’ at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for asking us to give a paper on the topic of posthumanism and public health. This conference paper was the basis for this article, and comments at the conference helped tremendously in revising and refining our arguments here. We would also like to thank Angela Cassidy for her comments and suggestions on our handling of One-health in an earlier version of this paper, and Juan Pablo Pardo Guerra for his comments on the bibliometric analysis. The comments from two anonymous reviewers helped us to improve the paper tremendously, for which we are very grateful.

Notes

1. We would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this point.

2. That said, Tirado, Gómez, and Rocamora (2015) have analysed influenza using Actor Network Theory and so provide a crucial insight into how the injunction to follow the nonhuman can be put to good use in the context of public health.