Challenges and Solutions
Environmental Injustice and Health Disparities: Challenges and Considerations
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anuli Njoku
Introduction of harmful pollutants into the environment, whether natural or human made, can damage the quality of air, water, land, and built environment. Inequitable exposure to environmental pollutants (e.g., air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, noise pollution, radioactive pollution, and pharmaceutical pollution) among communities of color and marginalized populations nationally and globally fuels health disparities and threatens health equity. Social determinants of health are largely responsible for health inequities, or unfair and avoidable differences in health status between countries and between different groups of people within the same country. Addressing underlying determinants of health is necessary to overcome inequities that result in health disparities. Throughout the world, people that suffer the most from environmental pollution often contribute the least to the problem. Environmental conditions play a key role in producing and maintaining health disparities. Environmental pollution in the context of health disparities encourages the examination of how environmental racism and injustice intensifies inequities in exposure to environmental pollutants among communities of color and marginalized populations, increases risk for disease and mortality and threatens health equity. This paper discusses environmental injustice and health disparities with a focus on case study examples from around the world, including from Indigenous peoples and communities in North America and countries within Africa. Policy, public health, health system, and community-engaged approaches are also explored to address the inequitable sharing of environmental risk burdens and effects of environmental degradation and promote health equity.
Storytelling Time: Morality and Temporality as Impetus to Acting on Grand Challenges
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Usha Haley
Using insights from Martin Heidegger and Mikhail Bakhtin, we develop a theory of how interactive conceptions of time and morality may stimulate actions on societal issues. We demonstrate how individuals’, communities’ and societal storytelling of time relates to outcomes. We expand literature on the physics and sociology of time with a model that explains how crafted and recrafted pre-narratives and narratives of space-time change in relation to each other to influence societal responses to grand environmental challenges. We concentrate on societal, managerial and corporate developments regrading green technology in the energy sector. Our storytelling model of the tempos and rhythms of time focuses on subjective perceptions of the present, future, and past woven together by moral imperatives and intensity to decide on present actions that impact distant futures, which in turn influence understandings of the past. Our model both extends and reinterprets our actions regarding environmental sustainability with implications of policy and practice.
The Cultural Wellbeing of Us: Ecologies of Living Well in Changing Times
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Karin Louise
World events such as COVID and climate change have highlighted the interconnectedness of people and planet for living well in community. Despite our interconnectedness, wellbeing in community practice is positioned largely as a subjective psycho-social health issue that is best addressed through, individualised agentic strengths-based and resilience approaches. At the other end of the spectrum, wellbeing is understood as a set of discreet measurable social determinants or living standards. Neither fully captures the complex interplay between individual and structural influences on lived wellbeing in the community. Community practice researchers need holistic methodologies that can critically evaluate wellbeing for people and planet, whilst not obscuring the lived experience of wellbeing to inform effective policy and practice responses. This paper discusses the development of international evolution of cultural wellbeing into Living Standards frameworks and proposes an alternative Cultural Wellbeing Framework (CWF) that focuses on mapping lived wellbeing in community contexts. The CWF has emerged from community-centred research over ten years and aims to reframe wellbeing as a process of lived ecology that acknowledges the local and global influences on wellbeing using the language that reflects the lived experience of communities.
