Search

This article offers an overview of an Indigenous‐led participatory research project, The Future We Dream, co‐developed by rural land defenders in Central America and the Caribbean. To engage in recent dialectics concerning complicity and decolonising methodologies, we centre Indigenous Maya conceptions of health, wellbeing and what 'living well' means to community members. For context, The Future We Dream responds to the 2015 landmark ruling made by the Caribbean Court of Justice affirming the land rights of the Maya people of Southern Belize. Amidst tensions with the state that followed the ruling, an autonomous movement composed of grassroots organisers turned their attention towards imagining and constructing a self‐determined future. In turn, the communities initiated a research exercise inspired by desire‐based methodologies (Tuck, 2009) to articulate a collective vision of a healthful Maya future outside of colonial‐liberal worldviews, and notably, formulating Maya visions of healthful, sustainable worlds. In reporting on this one example of grassroots, anticolonial health research that departs from the hierarchal knowledge production practices of liberal academia, this paper details the collaborative process/project; the complexities/complicities of research involving Indigenous communities; and how Indigenous epistemologies are generative vis‐a‐vis unsettling conventional knowledge production practices in the contentious field of global health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public health is about policy, power, and the public and as such might be thought necessarily political. That does not mean, however, that the place of political analysis and engagement in public health is uncontroversial, and there have been longstanding arguments that to discuss politics sullies the scientific nature of public health. This article, introducing a special issue on political science in public health, argues that rigorous use of middle-range theory can inform our analysis of public health problems and avoid the risks of politicization, excessive abstraction or excessive concreteness. It summarizes key political science concepts discussed in the papers: epistemic communities, interest groups, advocacy coalitions, political parties, institutions, legalism, discourse and the political economy of labour. We hope that the series will provide the public health community with some tools and methods for how to integrate public health knowledge into the sphere of decision making in an appropriate way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]