Iris Borowy
Biographic Data
| ID | 358737 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Iris Borowy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Iris |
| FAMILY NAME | Borowy |
| SIGNATURE | BOROWY I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Shanghai University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7621-1195 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Delusion or reality? Analyzing the impact of collaboration and privatization initiatives on grassroots waste workers in Bangladesh
Effective waste management is a critical challenge for sustainable development, particularly in rapidly urbanizing low-income countries like Bangladesh. Collaborative and privatization models have emerged as common strategies to address inefficiencies in urban waste systems. This study explores the lived experiences of grassroots waste workers: sweepers, sanitation workers, transitory scavengers, door-to-door collectors, and small waste dealers. …
Beyond the clean city paradox: Environmental casteism in women's informal waste labor in urban Bangladesh
Urban sustainability in the Global South substantially depends on informal labor regimes that remain socially marginalized and politically invisible. In Bangladesh, approximately 400,000 grassroots waste workers, disproportionately from Dalit communities, recycle significant amounts of municipal solid waste, yet face systemic exclusion rooted in caste-based stigma, class-based poverty, and gender oppression. This study investigates how intersecti…
Too Much Modernity or Too Little: Efforts Towards a Global Discard Policy at the International Reference Centre for Wastes Disposal, 1966–1976
This paper examines the early development of international waste governance from 1966 to 1976. As industrialised nations generated more waste due to urbanisation and changing consumption, international organisations faced pressure to respond. The World Health Organization led efforts by creating the International Reference Centre for Wastes Disposal (IRCWD) in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute for Water Supply, Sewage Purification an…
War: Wasting at another Pace
War is naturally wasteful. Its destruction turns useful material into waste and generates discards before, during and after active fighting. This article looks at how warfare has affected waste and vice versa. It finds that waste serves to blur clear separations between war and non-war, both in terms of time and of its material management. Waste management during peace times can serve military purposes as much as war conditions can turn civilian …
Introduction: The Waste of Conflict. The Conflicts of Waste
Throughout human history, people have always produced waste, but during the last century, this has shown explosive growth. Globally, a combination of rising incomes, urbanization, the development of new, cheap materials, and changing lifestyles have driven the growth of products that were designed to be used for only limited periods of time producing a totally unprecedented amount and variety of waste. However, this development has not affected a…
Primary Health Care and Foreign Aid: A Tale of Two Germanys
The Declaration of Alma-Ata remains one of the momentous documents of public health. Its origins lie both in postwar efforts to improve population health in low-income countries and in social medicine promoted decades earlier in Europe. For industrialized countries in East and West, Alma-Ata, therefore, should have provided health-related guidelines both for domestic and foreign policy, though political interpretations of the social components of…
Inter-state and Intra-state Wars and Conflicts in the Horn of Africa
For the last five decades, there have been extensive, continuous, and challenging intra- and inter-state wars and conflicts in the Horn of Africa. As a result, the peace and stability of the region as well as the socioeconomic development and livelihood of the population have suffered greatly. This study explores the reasons for the frequent conflicts in the region, analyzing the different types of conflict that frequently take place in the regio…
A narrative analysis: Tragic images of the Aral Sea in the Russophone ecopoems
This study examines contemporary poems on the Aral Sea crisis. Labelling them Russophone, the authors argue that the Russian language holds its status of lingua franca for the poets concerned about the environmental disaster in Central Asia. In these poems, the Aral Sea has become a central metaphor for the catastrophe that transcends the original case. The depiction of the diverse environmental issues caused by expanded irrigation policies in So…
How Nato Influenced International Governance in Hazardous Waste
Increasing production and wealth in industrialized countries led to an increase in waste production, part of which was clearly harmful to human and non-human health. Out of several intergovernmental organizations that addressed related questions, the NATO Commission on Challenges of Modern Society (CCMS) was the first to organize a specific project dedicated to the topic. Between 1973 and 1981, delegates from nine NATO countries studies aspects r…
From the globe to the planet? New challenges of global and environmental history
Eseh Notepad
From the Globe to the Planet? New Challenges of Global and Environmental History
International audience
Of Perpetrators and Victims: Toxicity in Environmental History
This forum unites the articles of six scholars whose different, but complementary, approaches shed light on some key themes of the environmental history of toxicity. One recurrent line of questioning asks who is to blame for the steady increase in poisons in the global environment over the past century. While Marco Armiero identifies capitalism as the main driving force, Michelle Mart and Iris Borowy see more deep-seated social and psychological …
Making Sense of the History of Toxicity: How Poisonous Pasts May Have Touched Me and Everybody Else
Global development: A Cold War history
Sara Lorenzini offers a lucid, well written and often insightful narrative on the main global development concepts and policies between 1945 and 1989. Condensed to 178 pages, her volume is a decept
Medical waste: The Dark Side of Healthcare
Hospitals and other health facilities generate an ever-increasing amount of waste, approximately 15% of which may be infectious, toxic, or radioactive. The World Health Organization has been addressing the issue since the 1980s. After initially focusing on high-income countries, it then focused on low-income countries, with unsafe disposal methods in landfills and inadequate incinerators as major concerns. Gradually, the understanding of the issu…
Hazardous Waste: The Beginning of International Organizations Addressing a Growing Global Challenge in the 1970s
Hazardous waste began gaining public attention in industrialized countries in the 1970s, partly as a result of several scandals involving former waste sites. Early on, several international organizations (IOs), notably the EEC, NATO, OECD and WHO, addressed the issue in publications, surveys and the collection of data. Collectively, these initiatives addressed crucial questions regarding the definition, collection, transportation and disposal of …
Before Unep: Who was in charge of the global environment? The struggle for institutional responsibility 1968–72
Many of the international technical agencies formed after 1945 addressed environmental topics within their specific fields of work. By the late 1960s, a growing awareness of pollution and an emerging environmental movement in Western countries led to a perceived need for more coordinated and institutionalized international cooperation on the environment. Before the landmark United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in …
Global health
When the United States Institute of Medicine conducted a survey among 29 international health leaders at the turn of the last century, asking what difference they saw between global and international health, some thought that global health responded to an increased awareness of globalization and global interdependence, while others felt it was merely a new word. This chapter looks at the historical contexts in which ‘global health’ emerged and un…
History of the Future of Economic Growth: Historical Roots of Current Debates on Sustainable Degrowth
Sustainable health and degrowth: Health, health care and society beyond the growth paradigm
History of the Future of Economic Growth: Historical Roots of Current Debates on Sustainable Degrowth
The future of economic growth is one of the decisive questions of the twenty-first century. Alarmed by declining growth rates in industrialized countries, climate change, and rising socio-economic inequalities, among other challenges, more and more people demand to look for alternatives beyond growth. However, so far these current debates about sustainability, post-growth or degrowth lack a thorough historical perspective. This edited volume brin…
East German medical aid to Nicaragua: The Politics of Solidarity Between Biomedicine and Primary Health Care
Between 1979 and 1989 the government of the German Democratic Republic provided health assistance to Sandinista Nicaragua. After initial relief aid, the Sandinista embrace of a primary health care-based health system made East German health support difficult. The non-convertible currency, the repressive quality of the East German leadership, and the lack of experience with primary health care processes all limited its potential to provide support…
Medical Aid, Repression, and International Relations: The East German Hospital at Metema
Between 1984 and 1988, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) built a hospital in a remote part of Ethiopia, close to the Sudanese border. The project evolved in a complex combination of contexts, including the general foreign policy goals of the GDR, its specific alliance with Ethiopia, the famine of 1984-85, civil war in Ethiopia, and a controversial resettlement program by the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. Though almost unknown today, it …
Negotiating international development: The making of the Millennium Development Goals
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) evolved in the competition between two perspectives on development: one that sees the reasons for poverty and misery in the specificities of the countries concerned (the localist view) and another that looks at the global context, including and especially the policies of “developed” high-income countries (the globalist view). The core of the MDGs emerged in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Dev…
Similar but different: Health and economic crisis in 1990s Cuba and Russia
Before Unep: Who was in charge of the global environment? The struggle for institutional responsibility 1968–72
Many of the international technical agencies formed after 1945 addressed environmental topics within their specific fields of work. By the late 1960s, a growing awareness of pollution and an emerging environmental movement in Western countries led to a perceived need for more coordinated and institutionalized international cooperation on the environment. Before the landmark United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in …
Global Health and Development: Conceptualizing Health between Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability
After World War II, health was firmly integrated into the discourse about national development. Transition theories portrayed health improvements as part of an overall development pattern based on economic growth as modeled by the recent history of industrialization in high-income countries. In the 1970s, an increasing awareness of the environmental degradation caused by industrialization challenged the conventional model of development. Graduall…
Making Sense of the History of Toxicity: How Poisonous Pasts May Have Touched Me and Everybody Else
Medical waste: The Dark Side of Healthcare
Hospitals and other health facilities generate an ever-increasing amount of waste, approximately 15% of which may be infectious, toxic, or radioactive. The World Health Organization has been addressing the issue since the 1980s. After initially focusing on high-income countries, it then focused on low-income countries, with unsafe disposal methods in landfills and inadequate incinerators as major concerns. Gradually, the understanding of the issu…
Crisis as opportunity: International health work during the economic depression
The economic depression of the 1930s represented the most important economic and social crisis of its time. Surprisingly, its effect on health did not show in available morbidity and mortality rates. In 1932, the League of Nations Health Organisation embarked on a six-point program addressing statistical methods of measuring the effect and its influence on mental health and nutrition and establishing ways to safeguard public health through more e…
Counting death and disease: Classification of death and disease in the interwar years, 1919–1939
The International Lists of Causes of Death and Diseases underwent their Fourth and Fifth Revisions during the years before the First and Second World Wars, the only time that two institutions of different disciplines, the International Statistical Institute and the League of Nations Health Organization, participated in the revision process. This resulted in a mixture of institutional rivalry and cooperation, involving national, ideological and pr…
How Nato Influenced International Governance in Hazardous Waste
Increasing production and wealth in industrialized countries led to an increase in waste production, part of which was clearly harmful to human and non-human health. Out of several intergovernmental organizations that addressed related questions, the NATO Commission on Challenges of Modern Society (CCMS) was the first to organize a specific project dedicated to the topic. Between 1973 and 1981, delegates from nine NATO countries studies aspects r…
From the Globe to the Planet? New Challenges of Global and Environmental History
International audience
Sustainable health and degrowth: Health, health care and society beyond the growth paradigm
East German medical aid to Nicaragua: The Politics of Solidarity Between Biomedicine and Primary Health Care
Between 1979 and 1989 the government of the German Democratic Republic provided health assistance to Sandinista Nicaragua. After initial relief aid, the Sandinista embrace of a primary health care-based health system made East German health support difficult. The non-convertible currency, the repressive quality of the East German leadership, and the lack of experience with primary health care processes all limited its potential to provide support…
Medical Aid, Repression, and International Relations: The East German Hospital at Metema
Between 1984 and 1988, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) built a hospital in a remote part of Ethiopia, close to the Sudanese border. The project evolved in a complex combination of contexts, including the general foreign policy goals of the GDR, its specific alliance with Ethiopia, the famine of 1984-85, civil war in Ethiopia, and a controversial resettlement program by the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. Though almost unknown today, it …
Shifting Between Biomedical and Social Medicine: International Health Organizations in the 20th Century
International health organizations emerged in the 19th century as a means to reconcile the needs of a world of increasing trade and mobility with the increasing threat of the spread of diseases. Inexorably, they have assumed a growing list of responsibilities. Throughout the 20th century, their work has been torn between two approaches to health: one biomedical, which saw health as a function of pathogens and diseases and called for vertical camp…
Counting death and disease: Classification of death and disease in the interwar years, 1919–1939
The International Lists of Causes of Death and Diseases underwent their Fourth and Fifth Revisions during the years before the First and Second World Wars, the only time that two institutions of different disciplines, the International Statistical Institute and the League of Nations Health Organization, participated in the revision process. This resulted in a mixture of institutional rivalry and cooperation, involving national, ideological and pr…
Crisis as opportunity: International health work during the economic depression
The economic depression of the 1930s represented the most important economic and social crisis of its time. Surprisingly, its effect on health did not show in available morbidity and mortality rates. In 1932, the League of Nations Health Organisation embarked on a six-point program addressing statistical methods of measuring the effect and its influence on mental health and nutrition and establishing ways to safeguard public health through more e…
Hygiene im Namen des Staates: Das Reichsgesundheitsamt 1876–1933 (review)
Reviewed by: Hygiene im Namen des Staates: Das Reichsgesundheitsamt 1876–1933 Iris Borowy Axel C. Hüntelmann. Hygiene im Namen des Staates: Das Reichsgesundheitsamt 1876–1933. Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2008. 488 pp. Ill. (978-3-8353-0343-0). In Hygiene im Namen des Staates: Das Reichsgesundheitsamt 1876–1933, Axel Hüntelmann provides a lucid and meticulously researched account of the first half-century of the German Imperial Health Bu…
Similar but different: Health and economic crisis in 1990s Cuba and Russia
La Société des nations,la crise des années 1930 et la santé
L’Organisation d’hygiène de la Société des nations fut surprise par la crise économique de 1929. Même quand il paraissait clair que les circonstances auraient forcément un effet négatif sur la santé publique, cet effet n’était pas évident à repérer dans les données de mortalité, ce qui rendait la situation difficile à interpréter. L’organisation initia alors une série de programmes conçus pour identifier les conséquences sanitaires de la crise et…
Global Health and Development: Conceptualizing Health between Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability
After World War II, health was firmly integrated into the discourse about national development. Transition theories portrayed health improvements as part of an overall development pattern based on economic growth as modeled by the recent history of industrialization in high-income countries. In the 1970s, an increasing awareness of the environmental degradation caused by industrialization challenged the conventional model of development. Graduall…
Shifting Between Biomedical and Social Medicine: International Health Organizations in the 20th Century
International health organizations emerged in the 19th century as a means to reconcile the needs of a world of increasing trade and mobility with the increasing threat of the spread of diseases. Inexorably, they have assumed a growing list of responsibilities. Throughout the 20th century, their work has been torn between two approaches to health: one biomedical, which saw health as a function of pathogens and diseases and called for vertical camp…
Negotiating international development: The making of the Millennium Development Goals
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) evolved in the competition between two perspectives on development: one that sees the reasons for poverty and misery in the specificities of the countries concerned (the localist view) and another that looks at the global context, including and especially the policies of “developed” high-income countries (the globalist view). The core of the MDGs emerged in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Dev…
Medical Aid, Repression, and International Relations: The East German Hospital at Metema
Between 1984 and 1988, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) built a hospital in a remote part of Ethiopia, close to the Sudanese border. The project evolved in a complex combination of contexts, including the general foreign policy goals of the GDR, its specific alliance with Ethiopia, the famine of 1984-85, civil war in Ethiopia, and a controversial resettlement program by the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. Though almost unknown today, it …
History of the Future of Economic Growth: Historical Roots of Current Debates on Sustainable Degrowth
Sustainable health and degrowth: Health, health care and society beyond the growth paradigm
History of the Future of Economic Growth: Historical Roots of Current Debates on Sustainable Degrowth
The future of economic growth is one of the decisive questions of the twenty-first century. Alarmed by declining growth rates in industrialized countries, climate change, and rising socio-economic inequalities, among other challenges, more and more people demand to look for alternatives beyond growth. However, so far these current debates about sustainability, post-growth or degrowth lack a thorough historical perspective. This edited volume brin…
East German medical aid to Nicaragua: The Politics of Solidarity Between Biomedicine and Primary Health Care
Between 1979 and 1989 the government of the German Democratic Republic provided health assistance to Sandinista Nicaragua. After initial relief aid, the Sandinista embrace of a primary health care-based health system made East German health support difficult. The non-convertible currency, the repressive quality of the East German leadership, and the lack of experience with primary health care processes all limited its potential to provide support…
Global health
When the United States Institute of Medicine conducted a survey among 29 international health leaders at the turn of the last century, asking what difference they saw between global and international health, some thought that global health responded to an increased awareness of globalization and global interdependence, while others felt it was merely a new word. This chapter looks at the historical contexts in which ‘global health’ emerged and un…
Hazardous Waste: The Beginning of International Organizations Addressing a Growing Global Challenge in the 1970s
Hazardous waste began gaining public attention in industrialized countries in the 1970s, partly as a result of several scandals involving former waste sites. Early on, several international organizations (IOs), notably the EEC, NATO, OECD and WHO, addressed the issue in publications, surveys and the collection of data. Collectively, these initiatives addressed crucial questions regarding the definition, collection, transportation and disposal of …
Before Unep: Who was in charge of the global environment? The struggle for institutional responsibility 1968–72
Many of the international technical agencies formed after 1945 addressed environmental topics within their specific fields of work. By the late 1960s, a growing awareness of pollution and an emerging environmental movement in Western countries led to a perceived need for more coordinated and institutionalized international cooperation on the environment. Before the landmark United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in …
Global development: A Cold War history
Sara Lorenzini offers a lucid, well written and often insightful narrative on the main global development concepts and policies between 1945 and 1989. Condensed to 178 pages, her volume is a decept
Medical waste: The Dark Side of Healthcare
Hospitals and other health facilities generate an ever-increasing amount of waste, approximately 15% of which may be infectious, toxic, or radioactive. The World Health Organization has been addressing the issue since the 1980s. After initially focusing on high-income countries, it then focused on low-income countries, with unsafe disposal methods in landfills and inadequate incinerators as major concerns. Gradually, the understanding of the issu…
Of Perpetrators and Victims: Toxicity in Environmental History
This forum unites the articles of six scholars whose different, but complementary, approaches shed light on some key themes of the environmental history of toxicity. One recurrent line of questioning asks who is to blame for the steady increase in poisons in the global environment over the past century. While Marco Armiero identifies capitalism as the main driving force, Michelle Mart and Iris Borowy see more deep-seated social and psychological …
Making Sense of the History of Toxicity: How Poisonous Pasts May Have Touched Me and Everybody Else
From the globe to the planet? New challenges of global and environmental history
Eseh Notepad
From the Globe to the Planet? New Challenges of Global and Environmental History
International audience
Inter-state and Intra-state Wars and Conflicts in the Horn of Africa
For the last five decades, there have been extensive, continuous, and challenging intra- and inter-state wars and conflicts in the Horn of Africa. As a result, the peace and stability of the region as well as the socioeconomic development and livelihood of the population have suffered greatly. This study explores the reasons for the frequent conflicts in the region, analyzing the different types of conflict that frequently take place in the regio…
A narrative analysis: Tragic images of the Aral Sea in the Russophone ecopoems
This study examines contemporary poems on the Aral Sea crisis. Labelling them Russophone, the authors argue that the Russian language holds its status of lingua franca for the poets concerned about the environmental disaster in Central Asia. In these poems, the Aral Sea has become a central metaphor for the catastrophe that transcends the original case. The depiction of the diverse environmental issues caused by expanded irrigation policies in So…
Political science (17 works) · Economics (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Economic growth (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Health care (5 works) · History (5 works)