This edited volume examines the complex entanglements of human, animal, and environmental health. It assembles leading scholars from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and medicine to explore existing One Health approaches and to envision a mode of health that is both more-than-human and also more sensitive to, and explicit about, colonial and neocolonial legacies-urging the decolonization of One Health.

While acknowledging the importance of One Health, the volume at the same time critically examines its roots, highlighting the structural biases and power dynamics still at play in this global health regime. The volume is distinctive in its geographic breadth. It travels from Inuit sled dogs in the Arctic to rock hyraxes in Jerusalem, from black-faced spoonbills in Taiwan to street dogs in India, from spittle-bugs on Mallorca's almond trees to jellyfish management at sea, and from rabies in sub-Saharan Africa to massive culling practices in South Korea. Together, the contributors call for One Health to move toward a more transparent, plural, and just perception of health that takes seriously the role of more-than-humans and of nonscientific knowledges, pointing to ways in which One Health can-and should-be decolonized.

This volume will appeal to researchers and practitioners in the medical humanities, posthumanities, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, animal studies, multispecies ethnography, anthrozoology, and critical public health.

The Open Access version of chapter 1, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003294085, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by the Wellcome Trust.

About the Author

Irus Braverman is Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Geography at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Her books include Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (2009), Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (2012), Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (2018), and Zoo Veterinarians: Governing Care on a Diseased Planet (2021). Braverman's latest monograph is entitled Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (forthcoming).

Reviews

"This stunningly important volume will become essential reading for all those concerned about the state of our planet's health and that of the myriad species whose futures are intertwined with each other in their complex symbiotic, environmental, and ecological interrelations. By marshalling a remarkably broad range of disciplinary expertise-including law, social sciences, and the humanities-beyond core sciences and medicine, this volume challenges the One Health movement to take account of fundamental, new questions of inclusivity within the broader sociopolitical and colonialist arenas of practice and collective action that do, will, and must address the broadest horizons of care for the sake of our planet and all of its inhabitants."

James J. Bono, Emeritus Professor, Department of History & School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA

"A hugely interesting book, which is making a genuinely new contribution to debates around One Health. Irus Braverman has drawn together authors from an exceptionally wide range of disciplines, including multiple humanities, multiple social sciences, key advocates of One Health, alongside critically important perspectives exploring ideas and challenges of shared health beyond the Global North-and beyond the human. The volume carefully places these contributions into productive dialogue, rather than rehearsing well-established oppositions, to develop new visions of what "One Health Otherwise" could look like. At a time when the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have forcibly made the case for why thinking about health across humans, other animals, and environments is needed, a volume which starts to explore how is welcome indeed."

Angela Cassidy, Senior Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy and Anthropology,University of Exeter, UK

"As Irus Braverman and the authors she has brought together in this volume point out, softening the ontological boundaries between the categories of the human, the animal, and the environment falls far short of the fundamental transformation in health praxis that the intensifying crises all earth beings are experiencing demands. Only by bringing an ethical lens-the lens of justice-to the ways in which those boundaries have justified and policed violent, hierarchical, colonial, and extractive relationships can One Health approach its promise."

Danielle Celermajer, Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Sydney, Australia

"The interconnectedness between human-animal-environment health is more apparent than ever, yet, as the chapters within reveal, One Health approaches are often still too anthropocentric, still caught up amidst neoliberal and colonial logics, still hesitant to engage with local knowledges. It is thus exciting and refreshing to see creative and critical engagement with One Health, particularly, an approach that draws on the humanities and social sciences to both expand and refine the conceptual toolkit of One Health whilst creating an agenda for transdisciplinary futures."

Richard Gorman, Research Fellow, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, University of Sussex, UK

"Accessibly written and brought to life through first-hand accounts from the worlds of policy and medicine, critical engagements with archival materials and multispecies ethnography, this collection takes seriously the challenge of understanding One Health in practice, in all its complex, contested, and compromised detail. Genuinely global and multidisciplinary in scale and scope, the chapters offer an important corrective to the limits of existing One Health scholarship, especially its tendencies towards anthropocentricism and its neglect of both non-Western knowledges and research in social sciences and humanities. This book is essential reading for scholars, policy makers, and anyone with an interest in the intersections between human, animal, and environmental wellbeing."

Beth Greenhough, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK

"This ground-breaking collection takes up the challenge not only of identifying the limitations of One Health, but of also of proposing how to move beyond it, and delivers urgently needed perspectives on how to approach the entanglements of human and nonhuman health."

Christos Lynteris, Professor of Medical Anthropology, University of St Andrews, UK

"This timely volume sketches out the potentials and limits of the One Health approach by choosing an interdisciplinary, ethical, and engaged perspective on multispecies and planetary life. In focusing on their subjects, human, animal and floral, in a relational manner, the authors also manage to combine, among other concepts, feminist theories with STS scholarship. As such, the volume provides a much-needed expansion on the interspecific thinking of health and illness."

Mieke Roscher, Professor, Department of History and Social Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany

Book Information
ISBN 9781032277868
Author Irus Braverman
Format Hardback
Page Count 284
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 752g