Health and Wellbeing

What Does a Healthy Person Look Like

• happiness, not ill, mentally calm, energetic, fit, balanced diet, sleep, rational, well informed, productive, flexible

• the healthy person rendered by these words is a particular kind of healthy person

Healthy and Wellbeing As A Project

• a project: something we should be invested in / strive towards

• takes work

• are governments, corporations, families or individuals responsible

• who determines what is healthy

Foucault → Health And Wellbeing As A Form Of Governance

• from the 18th century onwards - there has been a move in government from viewing people as subjects to people as part of the population which has trends, statistics, rates, expectancies + ultimately a concern with health

• increase of government intervention in public health

• power operates through effects to protect, regulate and optimise life

• biopolitics

BioPolitics

• a form of power concerned with fostering, regulating and managing biological life

• central concern of modern political power

Establishing Norms Of What Is Healthy

• establishing categories

• large role played by science which provides understanding → standards and measurements

• people are measured against these standards

• distinctions emerge between normal and abnormal

• individuals are encouraged to bring bodies in alignment with these norms

  • these norms are affected by culture and context

Health As A Self Project - Nicholas Rose

• how do we cultivate ourselves within a capitalist society - focus on productivity

• individuals have become increasingly responsible for managing their own health and wellbeing

• encouraged to treat health as projects requiring continuous investment, monitoring and improvement

• lifestyle, diet, exercise etc. become matters of personal responsibility

• move away from nature: body understand as something that can intervened in, modified and improved by human knowledge and technoloy

Mathew Wolf-Meyer → Health, Personhood and Neurology

ideas about health are closely connected to ideas about what it means to be a person

• the brain is central to understand consciousness, identity and personhood

• begun to stand in for the person

• brain as the coherent self w/n the body

Mathew Wolf-Meyer - The Liberal Individual

a model of the person as autonomous, able-bodied and capable of communicating their interior experience

• when someone cannot do these things their status as a whole person comes into question

• health becomes a measure of whether someone can be understood as a capable functioning person

Mathew Wolf-Meyer - Neurological Disorders

• some neurological disorders are associated with difficulties in communicating → not seen as whole persons

• understand neurological disorders in relation to broader social expectations through which forms of personhood become valued, rather than simply as problems located within the individual

• looks for ways to understand personhood beyond assumptions about autonomy, ability, and individual capacity

• make space

What Is Communication

• if we reduce communication to language we lose all other ways of communicating

• an interactions is not just about what is said

• neurological disorders often imagined through an inability to communicate → within that framework there is a stable self within a stable body and communication allows the interior self to be expressed outwards

Care

• health and wellbeing are connected to care

• care is both an academic concept and material thing in the world

• it is diverse in definition

Feminist Ethics and Care - Carol Gillian

• approach to ethical life which is grounded in relationships and responsibilities to others

• living well emerges through connection and relationships

• Gilligan challenges the privileging of individual rights and autonomy in moral reasoning

• moral responsibility emerges through relationships and attentiveness to others

Feminist Ethics and Care - Joan Tronto

• care should be understood as a central concern of political life, rather than regulated to the private sphere

• what is valuable is the more feminine characteristics of care giving not just autonomy and individuality

Care In Medical Anthropology - Anne Marie Mol

• the patient is imagined as an autonomous individual who makes informed decision between available healthcare options

• people are empowered as individuals to make their own choices but we are not experts

• leaves people feeling unsupported and turns individuals into consumers

• introduces tinkering → care is experimental, involving constant adjustments and different for everyone

Temporality, Care, and Personhood in the Danish Welfare State

• look at uncommon persons - premature infants, pigs, late stage dementia

• idea of time: crafting imagined futures / social relations

• animals can be used as long as the advantages outweigh the harm

  • suffering is measured in terms of benefits for the collectivity of future humans

• medical responsibility that children help should be able to fend for themselves and not limited to life in an institution

• for animals there is an undetermined temporal horizon of their sacrifice

• temporal imaginaries make personhood possible

• what does it take to make lives worthy

Taylor - Dementia

• auto-ethnography

• signs of recognition and caring in dementia that are not just communication ie. light up when she arrives, enjoys things in the present moment, deep rooted habit of care