What isn’t public health?

By recognizing the structural causes of health and illness, public health has often been associated with values of compassion and solidarity, and a relational understanding of human agency. Rather than supporting the consistent integration and application of these insights, however, public health is now sometimes invoked more as a rhetorical move, used to construct issues as simple questions of neoliberal scientistic rationalism. Public health practitioners must reckon, therefore, with how the field can be discursively deployed in the public square, for multiple divergent political ends. If public health is always positioned as a value-neutral and detached scientific approach to addressing complex subjects, from drug use to pandemics, it not only fails to connect with the arguments of its critics, but further divorces what was once called the public health ‘movement’ from the strong and progressive political and theoretical positions it was founded upon and should advocate for today.