Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives offers a radical
rethinking of the field by unsettling conventional ideas of mobility and
borders to highlight the ways in which they produce health inequalities.
Covering a wide range of topics, the text provides insight through a
critical lens, and proposes areas for intervention along with an added
emphasis on the need for future research to address the health
inequities that affect migrants. It illustrates how a critical
perspective can deepen our understanding of the relationship between
migration and health, which remains a defining global issue of our
century.
The text employs a critical approach to examine the structural
conditions of inequality and larger historical and political processes,
recognizing that exclusionary bordering practices increasingly occur
away from physical points of entry. It posits the concept of migration
as complex, tangled and multi-directional and underscores how migrant
vulnerability can shape the lives of people in wider communities.
Furthermore, it acknowledges diverse and intersectional standpoints, as
well as shifting spatial and temporal influences. Chapters include
coverage of health in transit; healthcare access and utilization;
clinical encounters; communicable disease; labor and occupational
health; gender and sexuality; immigration enforcement, detention,
deportation; and the effects of forced displacement on refugee and
asylum-seeker health.
The text is useful for students and scholars of migration or health
disparities seeking to understand how the two issues can be approached
in a more holistic and critical way. It is further aimed at
practitioners and policymakers who are interested in gaining familiarity
with the structural conditions of inequality along with the larger
historical and political processes that influence contemporary migration
patterns.
