Clare Herrick
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 132987 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Clare Herrick |
| NOMBRES | Clare |
| APELLIDO | Herrick |
| FIRMA | HERRICK C |
| AFILIACIONES | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5402-4639 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 49 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 211 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2005 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Hospital beds as barometers
While hospital beds are at the heart of healthcare delivery, they have received little conceptual attention within the socialsciences. Instead, the focus has tended to be on explaining their changing numerical characteristics and the consequences of this for patient care, health systems functioning and the practices of the healthcare professions. While the number of beds iscertainly of critical importance, this paper pushes beyond this to examine…
Revisiting Robert Crawford's ‘Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life’
This special issue revisits Robert Crawford's influential 1980 paper ‘Healthism and the medicalization of everyday life’ to reassess its conceptual value for contemporary medical sociology. We show how healthism emerged from 1970s US struggles to reconcile behavioural risk, environmental determinants and political‐economic uncertainty, crystallising as an ideology that individualises responsibility while obscuring the social conditions of health.…
What Is a Doctor? Braided Global Histories of Medical Assistants, Intermediaries and Auxiliaries
The 'Physician Associate' (PA) is one of numerous assistants and auxiliaries that staff healthcare systems across the world. Advocates for the role often trace its origins to North American manpower experiments that aimed to address the 'doctor shortage' of the 1960s in creative and cost-effective ways. As this article explores, this geographically narrow origin story not only omits the careful 'crafting' of the American PA role over six decades,…
Medical Futurology
The history of Britain's National Health Service is a history of crises: staffing shortages; insufficient capital investment; and a lack of infrastructure rendered worse by the absence of the long‐term funding settlements needed to ensure the service's future. The “critical condition” (Darzi 2024:131; https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent‐investigation‐of‐the‐nhs‐in‐england ) of the NHS in the present makes reflection on the futu…
How many doctors does a health system need? Histories of workforce planning in the NHS
Health systems across the world are currently facing profound workforce shortages. This is, however, not a new phenomenon. Drawing on the case study of the British National Health Service (NHS), we explore how it has struggled to answer the fundamental question of how many doctors it needs with any accuracy or certainty. While the NHS is organisationally complex, it remains one of the world's most monopolistic health care systems. Despite this, t…
Coordinating the Medical Division of Labour
This paper explores the interrelations between medical specialisation, the changing division of medical labour and the technologies that have emerged to coordinate and integrate patient care. Drawing on the examples of the United Kingdom and the United States, countries whose health systems provide important points of commonality and distinction, I explore the intersections between the rise of medical specialisation and the creation of new medica…
Noncommunicable Diseases and the Uses of World Health Magazine 1958–1998
World Health magazine served as the World Health Organization's (WHO) flagship "popular" publication from 1958 to 1998. It played a central role in the organization's public information and education work, which aimed to inform readers about existing and emergent health concerns, as well as promoting WHO's programmatic response to these. Drawing on analysis of the magazine's coverage of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) as one such emergent concern…
Problems of past anticipations of the future
This commentary explores historical efforts to diagnose the present and project the future through the specific example of medical manpower planning. To situate this, it draws on work within and across geography exploring the concept of anticipation and considers the discipline's failure to adequately engage with healthcare workers, despite the vibrancy of health geography as a subdiscipline. As it explores, ensuring adequate numbers of staff in …
The social life of natural experiments in epidemiology and public health
Over the twentieth century, the concept of the natural experiment has become increasingly prominent across a variety of disciplines, albeit most consequentially in epidemiology and public health. Drawing on an analysis of the scientific and medical literature, we explore the social life of the natural experiment, tracing its changing use, meaning and uptake to better understand the work done by the concept. We demonstrate how the natural experime…
We thank you for your sacrifice’
The ‘health workforce crisis’ and ‘the medical manpower problem’
Geographic Mythology and Global Health
Abdel Omran’s epidemiological transition theory has become a convenient heuristic device for explaining shifts in the global distribution of disease. In turn, the temporal and geographic transition from “pandemics of infection” to “degenerative and man-made diseases” (Omran 1971, 161) as countries develop has become part of the mythology of global health. Such myths are powerful not because they are necessarily clearly true or false, but rather f…
Clean problems
In this paper, I first explore the actors, events, evidence and arguments that enabled noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) to be constructed, from the 1990s onwards, as a ‘global epidemic’ and ‘global crisis’ that threatened social and economic development. I then examine how two decades of action since the Global Strategy on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases (World Health Organization, 2000) has revealed the limits to that probl…
Humanitarian inversions
COVID-19 is a multi-spectral crisis that has added an acute layer over a panoply of complex emergencies across the world. In the process, it has not only exposed actually-existing emergencies, but also exacerbated them as the global gaze has turned inward. As a crisis, COVID-19 straddles and challenges the boundaries between humanitarianism, development and global health - the frames and categories through which emergencies are so often understoo…
The changing climates of global health
International audience
Epidemic confusions
The movement to decolonise global health is gathering pace. In its concern with the fundamental, distal causes of inequality and its call for social justice, the decolonisation movement forces us to question how global health works, for whom, where it is located, its funding practices, power asymmetries, cultures of collaboration and publication. This paper uses a new book by Harvard-based physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson, Epidemic I…
The future of the global noncommunicable disease agenda after Covid-19
Unequal ecosystems of global health authorial expertise
The ‘noncommunicable disease space’
Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are a complex category composed of five diseases and five behavioural and environmental risk factors. These are, in turn, represented by multiple constituencies and communities of expertise and interest. This fractured landscape is evidenced by and magnified through an abject lack of conferences devoted to the category of NCDs. One of the very few is the NCD Alliance Forum, most recently held in February 2020 in Sh…
Concepts, disciplines and politics
It has long been recognised that human health is indelibly shaped by a variety of factors. These include pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, but also broad-ranging social, economic and political forces operating at different spatial scales. In seeking to understand the nature and effects of these forces, two concepts have become particularly influential: the ‘social determinants of health’ and ‘structural violence’. In this paper, we critical…
The optics of noncommunicable diseases
Until recently, the noncommunicable disease (NCD) category was composed of four chronic diseases (cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease) and four shared, 'modifiable' behavioural risk factors (smoking, diet, physical activity and alcohol). In late 2018, the NCD category was expanded to include mental health as an additional disease outcome and air pollution as an explicit environmental risk factor. The newly-exp…
Bringing relational comparison into development studies
Global health volunteering is premised on a comparative understanding of development: hospitals in developing countries are ‘behind’ modern institutions in developed nations, and sharing volunteers’ skills will enable the latter to ‘catch-up’. We argue for a ‘relational comparison’ in development studies, which draws upon a geographical conception of inequality premised on understanding places in relation to one another rather than reifying diffe…
Growing old in New Towns
This paper focuses on the planning of New Towns in the UK in order to explore what the design and planning of urban spaces can tell us about which populations and their health matter and are prioritized, at different points in time. We concentrate on how ageing was conceptualized, and what this tells us about how ageing societies and bodies are accounted for and understood. Through the dynamic evolution of people and place, we can also come to se…
Geographic charisma and the potential energy of Ebola
The Ebola virus is unparalleled in its charismatic ability to ignite fear, anxiety and disgust at a scale grossly disproportionate to the number of lives it claims. As an archetypal ‘Emerging Infectious Disease’ (EID), this designation and the politics that have encircled it have provided Ebola with a conceptual space in which epidemiology and geography to splice together in the genesis and maintenance of its charismatic valence. Even before the …
Global health volunteering, the Ebola outbreak, and instrumental humanitarianisms in Sierra Leone
Geographers have long been concerned with the spaces, scales, and conceptual significance of volunteering. They have, however, been slower to engage with the global surge in medical volunteering, whether in times of everyday or acute emergency. Volunteering is a crucial component of the architectures of global health and humanitarianism, but it remains marginal to the concerns of both health and development geographers. This paper seeks to addres…
Risky bodies
The politics of non-communicable diseases in the global South
In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of political concern in and for countries of the global South. While epidemiologists and public health practitioners and scholars have long expressed concern with the changing global distribution of the burden of NCDs, it is only in more recent years that the aetiology, politics and consequences of these shifts have become an object of critical social scienti…
Global Health, Geographical Contingency, and Contingent Geographies
Health geography has emerged from under the "shadow of the medical" to become one of the most vibrant of all the subdisciplines. Yet, this success has also meant that health research has become increasingly siloed within this subdisciplinary domain. As this article explores, this represents a potential lost opportunity with regard to the study of global health, which has instead come to be dominated by anthropology and political science. Chief am…
When places come first
The rise of global health as a field of study and site of intervention has animated significant critical social science engagements. Of these, medical anthropology has arguably emerged as the ascendant in the field with its growing corpus of writing and advocacy largely animated by the discipline's 'suffering slot'. This paper thus applies a geographical critique to anthropology's moral, humanitarian impulse to give voice to suffering by explorin…
Shifting blame/selling health
This paper examines how and why health has become a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy for the global food and drink industry (FDI) in the context of current governmental and public calls to address mounting obesity rates. It argues that, despite the current prominence of health within CSR, there has not been a reciprocal interest by those adopting sociological approaches to the study of health and illness in the implications of this …
Humanitarian inversions
COVID-19 is a multi-spectral crisis that has added an acute layer over a panoply of complex emergencies across the world. In the process, it has not only exposed actually-existing emergencies, but also exacerbated them as the global gaze has turned inward. As a crisis, COVID-19 straddles and challenges the boundaries between humanitarianism, development and global health - the frames and categories through which emergencies are so often understoo…
(Global) health geography and the post-2015 development agenda
This commentary complements and extends Brown and Moon's (2012) work on 'geography and global health' by starting where their piece finished - the post-2015 development agenda. It explores three core elements of this agenda: the debate over the revised Millennium Development Goals, new Sustainable Development Goals and the inclusion of non-communicable disease within both. It then critically reflects on the significance of this for three areas of…
The political ecology of alcohol as “disaster” in South Africa’s Western Cape
To the West and East of Interstate-35
The author draws on a case study of Austin, Texas to argue that the emerging cannon of critical obesity studies should be situated in and interrogated with reference to empirical research undertaken in the urban spaces that enable or constrain healthy behavior. With federal, state and city-scale government departments calling for concerted obesity-prevention efforts, it is suggested that this enterprise has now rendered Austin a space of philanth…
Cultures of GM’
The debate over genetically modified foods has become one of the defining environmental and social issues of the past decade. As the public naturalize biotechnology within existing cultural systems, this produces what I term ‘cultures of GM’. This paper examines how these ‘cultures’ are legitimized and sustained through an appraisal of divergent North American and European conceptions of risk and their translation into food labelling policies. It…
Bringing relational comparison into development studies
Global health volunteering is premised on a comparative understanding of development: hospitals in developing countries are ‘behind’ modern institutions in developed nations, and sharing volunteers’ skills will enable the latter to ‘catch-up’. We argue for a ‘relational comparison’ in development studies, which draws upon a geographical conception of inequality premised on understanding places in relation to one another rather than reifying diffe…
The Binds of Global Health Partnership
Global health partnerships (GHPs) are the conceptual cousin of partnerships in the development sphere. Since their emergence in the 1990s, the GHP mode of working and funding has mainly been applied to single-disease, vertical interventions. However, GHPs are increasingly being used to enact Health Systems Strengthening and to address the global health worker shortage. In contrast to other critical explorations of GHPs, we explore in this article…
Designing the Fit City
The relationship between the built environment, physical activity, and well-being is currently attracting concerted government attention in the UK which has been formalized through new sets of urban planning and design guidelines. In light of this, the author argues that the domains of intersection between the physical environment and governmental health and social agendas need further exploration. Furthermore, she asserts that urban geographers …
The (non)charisma of noncommunicable diseases
Lost in the field
As a result of its importance to the discipline's identity and epistemology, the nature of fieldwork and the fieldtrip itself have recently come under close scrutiny in the education and geographical literature. Moreover, not only is their pedagogical importance being debated, but also their future viability at a time of increasing pressure on institutions to minimise potential risk situations in the field, offer value for money to students as we…
Global health volunteering, the Ebola outbreak, and instrumental humanitarianisms in Sierra Leone
Geographers have long been concerned with the spaces, scales, and conceptual significance of volunteering. They have, however, been slower to engage with the global surge in medical volunteering, whether in times of everyday or acute emergency. Volunteering is a crucial component of the architectures of global health and humanitarianism, but it remains marginal to the concerns of both health and development geographers. This paper seeks to addres…
The strategic geographies of global health partnerships
Comparative urban research and mass participation running events
This article ruminates on a research project comparing the relationships between two mass participation running events (MPREs) - Newcastle's Great North and Addis Ababa's Great Ethiopian Run - and their public health, development and place promotion objectives. It argues that the disjuncture between the intentions of the research framework and the actions necessitated by the reality of the field facilitates a deeper engagement with the two interw…
Geographic charisma and the potential energy of Ebola
The Ebola virus is unparalleled in its charismatic ability to ignite fear, anxiety and disgust at a scale grossly disproportionate to the number of lives it claims. As an archetypal ‘Emerging Infectious Disease’ (EID), this designation and the politics that have encircled it have provided Ebola with a conceptual space in which epidemiology and geography to splice together in the genesis and maintenance of its charismatic valence. Even before the …
The post-2015 landscape
This paper explores the tensions between UN calls for private sector engagement in the post-2015 landscape and public health opposition to those 'harm industries' that are 'corporate vectors of disease' for the mounting global non-communicable disease burden. The UN's support for public-private partnership has provided industries with 'vested interests' in the propagation of unhealthy behaviours with new opportunities for the strategic alignment …
Problems of past anticipations of the future
This commentary explores historical efforts to diagnose the present and project the future through the specific example of medical manpower planning. To situate this, it draws on work within and across geography exploring the concept of anticipation and considers the discipline's failure to adequately engage with healthcare workers, despite the vibrancy of health geography as a subdiscipline. As it explores, ensuring adequate numbers of staff in …
Formalising urban informality
In early 2012, South Africa's Western Cape Province enacted new alcohol control legislation amid mounting concern with the costs of alcohol-related harms. This has focused on urban shebeen closure to control the informal, unlicensed trade and the harms it generates through crime, violence and injury. In contrast to policy discourse, this paper contends that rather than existingoutside regulation, the city's shebeeners embrace multiple (self and c…
What Is a Doctor? Braided Global Histories of Medical Assistants, Intermediaries and Auxiliaries
The 'Physician Associate' (PA) is one of numerous assistants and auxiliaries that staff healthcare systems across the world. Advocates for the role often trace its origins to North American manpower experiments that aimed to address the 'doctor shortage' of the 1960s in creative and cost-effective ways. As this article explores, this geographically narrow origin story not only omits the careful 'crafting' of the American PA role over six decades,…
Medical Futurology
The history of Britain's National Health Service is a history of crises: staffing shortages; insufficient capital investment; and a lack of infrastructure rendered worse by the absence of the long‐term funding settlements needed to ensure the service's future. The “critical condition” (Darzi 2024:131; https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent‐investigation‐of‐the‐nhs‐in‐england ) of the NHS in the present makes reflection on the futu…
Coordinating the Medical Division of Labour
This paper explores the interrelations between medical specialisation, the changing division of medical labour and the technologies that have emerged to coordinate and integrate patient care. Drawing on the examples of the United Kingdom and the United States, countries whose health systems provide important points of commonality and distinction, I explore the intersections between the rise of medical specialisation and the creation of new medica…
Cultures of GM’
The debate over genetically modified foods has become one of the defining environmental and social issues of the past decade. As the public naturalize biotechnology within existing cultural systems, this produces what I term ‘cultures of GM’. This paper examines how these ‘cultures’ are legitimized and sustained through an appraisal of divergent North American and European conceptions of risk and their translation into food labelling policies. It…
Risky bodies
To the West and East of Interstate-35
The author draws on a case study of Austin, Texas to argue that the emerging cannon of critical obesity studies should be situated in and interrogated with reference to empirical research undertaken in the urban spaces that enable or constrain healthy behavior. With federal, state and city-scale government departments calling for concerted obesity-prevention efforts, it is suggested that this enterprise has now rendered Austin a space of philanth…
Designing the Fit City
The relationship between the built environment, physical activity, and well-being is currently attracting concerted government attention in the UK which has been formalized through new sets of urban planning and design guidelines. In light of this, the author argues that the domains of intersection between the physical environment and governmental health and social agendas need further exploration. Furthermore, she asserts that urban geographers …
Shifting blame/selling health
This paper examines how and why health has become a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy for the global food and drink industry (FDI) in the context of current governmental and public calls to address mounting obesity rates. It argues that, despite the current prominence of health within CSR, there has not been a reciprocal interest by those adopting sociological approaches to the study of health and illness in the implications of this …
Challenging Assumptions
As ‘health’ climbs academic, policy, commercial, non-profit and societal agendas, it has become increasingly subject to scrutiny by geographers. Yet, while health geographers may explore the discursive production, operationalization, deployment and management of health; the role of pedagogical practices has been repeatedly overlooked despite the clear intersections between the discipline's ongoing debate over its criticality and critical pedagogi…
Lost in the field
As a result of its importance to the discipline's identity and epistemology, the nature of fieldwork and the fieldtrip itself have recently come under close scrutiny in the education and geographical literature. Moreover, not only is their pedagogical importance being debated, but also their future viability at a time of increasing pressure on institutions to minimise potential risk situations in the field, offer value for money to students as we…
The political ecology of alcohol as “disaster” in South Africa’s Western Cape
Alcohol control and urban livelihoods in developing countries
This commentary explores how household economic necessity and the public health aspirations set out in the WHO’s global strategy to reduce the harmful use of alcohol might be reconciled in the context of alcohol control in developing countries. The ‘ambiguity’ of alcohol’s role in social and economic development is clear, but, as yet, little progress has been made on how best to integrate alcohol control within development policies in low- and mi…
Alcohol, ideological schisms and a science of corporate behaviours on health
Consensus is fast building in the public health community around the need to research and address the ‘industrial epidemics’ of non-communicable disease across both Global North and South. However, while it is agreed that the effects of corporate behaviour on health are serious, there have been limited attempts to map out what a ‘science’ of these interrelationships might be. To do this requires actively engaging with the ways in which corporate …
(Global) health geography and the post-2015 development agenda
This commentary complements and extends Brown and Moon's (2012) work on 'geography and global health' by starting where their piece finished - the post-2015 development agenda. It explores three core elements of this agenda: the debate over the revised Millennium Development Goals, new Sustainable Development Goals and the inclusion of non-communicable disease within both. It then critically reflects on the significance of this for three areas of…
Formalising urban informality
In early 2012, South Africa's Western Cape Province enacted new alcohol control legislation amid mounting concern with the costs of alcohol-related harms. This has focused on urban shebeen closure to control the informal, unlicensed trade and the harms it generates through crime, violence and injury. In contrast to policy discourse, this paper contends that rather than existingoutside regulation, the city's shebeeners embrace multiple (self and c…
An urban health worthy of the post-2015 era
This paper explores the intersections between the newly agreed urban and health Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 3 and 11). It argues that while burgeoning studies theorizing cities of the global South have thus far largely failed to engage with the formative role of health in the experience of urban life and politics, concern with “global” health (health in the global South) has been slow to engage with the specific importance of urban issues…
The politics of non-communicable diseases in the global South
In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of political concern in and for countries of the global South. While epidemiologists and public health practitioners and scholars have long expressed concern with the changing global distribution of the burden of NCDs, it is only in more recent years that the aetiology, politics and consequences of these shifts have become an object of critical social scienti…
Comparative urban research and mass participation running events
This article ruminates on a research project comparing the relationships between two mass participation running events (MPREs) - Newcastle's Great North and Addis Ababa's Great Ethiopian Run - and their public health, development and place promotion objectives. It argues that the disjuncture between the intentions of the research framework and the actions necessitated by the reality of the field facilitates a deeper engagement with the two interw…
The (non)charisma of noncommunicable diseases
Global Health, Geographical Contingency, and Contingent Geographies
Health geography has emerged from under the "shadow of the medical" to become one of the most vibrant of all the subdisciplines. Yet, this success has also meant that health research has become increasingly siloed within this subdisciplinary domain. As this article explores, this represents a potential lost opportunity with regard to the study of global health, which has instead come to be dominated by anthropology and political science. Chief am…
The post-2015 landscape
This paper explores the tensions between UN calls for private sector engagement in the post-2015 landscape and public health opposition to those 'harm industries' that are 'corporate vectors of disease' for the mounting global non-communicable disease burden. The UN's support for public-private partnership has provided industries with 'vested interests' in the propagation of unhealthy behaviours with new opportunities for the strategic alignment …
Global Health and Geographical Imaginaries
The New Urban Agenda
The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito ‘New Urban Agenda’ that is still taking shape. This paper raises questions around the potential for reduction…
The strategic geographies of global health partnerships
When places come first
The rise of global health as a field of study and site of intervention has animated significant critical social science engagements. Of these, medical anthropology has arguably emerged as the ascendant in the field with its growing corpus of writing and advocacy largely animated by the discipline's 'suffering slot'. This paper thus applies a geographical critique to anthropology's moral, humanitarian impulse to give voice to suffering by explorin…
The Binds of Global Health Partnership
Global health partnerships (GHPs) are the conceptual cousin of partnerships in the development sphere. Since their emergence in the 1990s, the GHP mode of working and funding has mainly been applied to single-disease, vertical interventions. However, GHPs are increasingly being used to enact Health Systems Strengthening and to address the global health worker shortage. In contrast to other critical explorations of GHPs, we explore in this article…
Bringing relational comparison into development studies
Global health volunteering is premised on a comparative understanding of development: hospitals in developing countries are ‘behind’ modern institutions in developed nations, and sharing volunteers’ skills will enable the latter to ‘catch-up’. We argue for a ‘relational comparison’ in development studies, which draws upon a geographical conception of inequality premised on understanding places in relation to one another rather than reifying diffe…
Growing old in New Towns
This paper focuses on the planning of New Towns in the UK in order to explore what the design and planning of urban spaces can tell us about which populations and their health matter and are prioritized, at different points in time. We concentrate on how ageing was conceptualized, and what this tells us about how ageing societies and bodies are accounted for and understood. Through the dynamic evolution of people and place, we can also come to se…
Political science (40 obras) · Sociology (32 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology (22 obras) · Medicine (22 obras) · Public relations (20 obras) · Politics (19 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Global health (16 obras) · Economic growth (15 obras)