Abstract
This essay makes notes in the margins of the vast corpus of work now encompassed by what is termed ‘social inequalities in health’, the best of which provides important evidence about what health inequalities are, how they come about and what might be done about them. However, much of this work still does not properly connect with either wider public debates about political economy or those focussed points of attention and concern which can be found in people's responses to the conditions in which inequality is experienced. The consequence of this is the production of policies to address health inequalities, which ignore the politics of those policies and further undermine those people already pushed to the margins by economic and political developments.
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Notes
When I presented an earlier version of this article at a meeting of the North East Medical Sociology Group in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I talked about red paint, but afterwards it was pointed out to me by one of the audience, Pauline McCormack from Newcastle University, that the slogan is associated more with anarchism than with socialism or communism. I recall the order of the words being as I have stated it, but the words are often reversed: ‘Eat the rich, feed the poor’. When delivered orally, the word order I have used contains a greater element of surprise, if timed correctly.
Possibly more than any other contemporary ‘singer–songwriter’, Springsteen recognises the importance of traditional songs and their reinterpretation for focussing our understanding of injustice and turning it into communal or collective action. In the sleeve notes to We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen (2006) writes of the title song: ‘The most important political protest song of all-time, sung around the world wherever people fight for justice and equality. Originally a Baptist hymn, brought into the labor movement in the 1930s, popularized among civil rights workers in the 1950s at the Highlander Folk Festival in Tennessee’, and taken up and reinterpreted by Pete Seeger, Martin Luther King, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg and countless others.
A reminder of Thompson's (1968) attempt to rescue the English working class from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.
It was in fact rubbish in more ways than one because the newspaper reporters had misunderstood the difference between ‘healthy life expectancy’ and ‘life expectancy’. Mrs Gillespie was right in more ways than one too. This is not to deny the fact that by any measure the health of many people on the estate is poor, but the statistics focus only on deficits, to the exclusion of the considerable assets to be found among the people living there, those ‘resources of hope’ about which Raymond Williams (1989) wrote.
As I understand it, this is what the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in collaboration with other research councils, is asking of applicants to some of its research programmes – http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Research-funding/Connected-Communities/Pages/Connected-Communities.aspx
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Acknowledgements
This article has benefited from two seminar presentations. An early version was presented at a symposium on ‘Health Inequalities in Changing Times’ at the BSA Medical Sociology Group Annual Conference held in September 2012 at the University of Leicester. I am grateful to the convenor, Ellen Annandale, for inviting me to speak. It was presented again to a meeting of the North East Medical Sociology Group on Tyneside in October 2012 and I would like to thank the convenors and the participants for their warm welcome and insightful contributions to the discussion.
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Williams, G. Social inequalities in health: Notes in the margins. Soc Theory Health 11, 117–132 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2013.2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2013.2