Howard Waitzkin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Health Sciences Center at the University of New Mexico [1] and adjunct professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Illinois. [2]
Waitzkin grew up in a small town in northeastern Ohio. At an early age, tragedy in his low-income family spurred his interest in the relationships among oppression and inequality, public health, and medicine. [3] Waitzkin received his MD and PhD in sociology from Harvard University in 1972. [4] Over the course of his career, Waitzkin has practiced as a primary care physician in internal medicine and has taught social medicine at a variety of clinics and universities, including the United Farm Workers Clinic in Salinas, California; La Clínica de la Raza in Oakland, California; Stanford University Medical Center; Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston; and the University of California. Waitzkin joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico in 1997. Currently, he practices medicine part-time in rural areas and is adjunct professor of internal medicine at the University of Illinois.
As an activist, he has worked for single payer national health programs in the United States and Latin America; local community and worker control for accessible health services; civilian health and mental health services for active duty military personnel in the struggle for peace; and policies to improve the social, political, and economic determinants of illness and early death. He currently serves as director of the Civilian Medical Resources Network, which provides civilian health and mental health services for GIs who have not been able to meet their needs in the military, [5] and president of the Allende Program in Social Medicine, a small foundation that supports work in social medicine worldwide. [6]
Waitzkin has authored eight books, including "Social Medicine and the Coming Transformation (Routledge, 2021) and Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire (Paradigm Publishers, 2011), and more than two hundred articles and chapters. His research has examined the patient-physician relationship, Latin American social medicine, neoliberal healthcare models in Latin America and the United States, and health and imperialism. [7] Waitzkin's work is inspired partly by Marxist theory and practice.
Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is considered the standard left wing ideology in most countries of the world. Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.
Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens was a Chilean socialist politician who served as the 28th president of Chile from 1970 until his death in 1973. As a socialist committed to democracy, he has been described as the first Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America.
Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism, is both a political philosophy and a term used to signify the late-20th-century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism. The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively. In scholarly use, the term is frequently undefined or used to characterize a vast variety of phenomena, but is primarily used to describe the transformation of society due to market-based reforms.
The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical philosophy. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism.
Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment. The field emphasizes the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and define as social issues, and societal responses to these problems.
Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian who promoted dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy, but rejected Marx's stages of history, and economic history generally.
Medicalization is the process by which human conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical conditions, and thus become the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment. Medicalization can be driven by new evidence or hypotheses about conditions; by changing social attitudes or economic considerations; or by the development of new medications or treatments.
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates with the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
Post-capitalism is in part a hypothetical state in which the economic systems of the world can no longer be described as forms of capitalism. Various individuals and political ideologies have speculated on what would define such a world. According to classical Marxist and social evolutionary theories, post-capitalist societies may come about as a result of spontaneous evolution as capitalism becomes obsolete. Others propose models to intentionally replace capitalism, most notably socialism, communism, anarchism, nationalism and degrowth.
John Holloway is a Marxist lawyer, sociologist and philosopher, whose work is closely associated with the Zapatista movement in Mexico, his home since 1991. It has also been taken up by some intellectuals associated with the piqueteros in Argentina; the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement in South Africa and the Anti-Globalization Movement in Europe and North America. He is currently a professor at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Puebla.
John Richard Urry was a British sociologist who served as a professor at Lancaster University. He is noted for work in the fields of the sociology of tourism and mobility.
Social medicine is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the profound interplay between socio-economic factors and individual health outcomes. Rooted in the challenges of the Industrial Revolution, it seeks to:
Oliver Cromwell Cox was a Trinidadian-American sociologist. Cox was born into a middle-class family in Port of Spain, Trinidad and emigrated to the United States in 1919. Growing up in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Cox was removed from the racial discrimination and hostilities that are present in the United States. Cox grew up as a member of the majority group, in a predominantly black world where white Europeans were considered outsiders. This perspective influenced Cox's research and sociological exploration.
James Petras is a retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who has published on political issues with particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East, imperialism, globalization, and leftist social movements.
Democratic socialism is a left-wing set of political philosophies that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-management within a market socialist, decentralised planned, or democratic centrally planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support revolutionary or reformist politics to establish socialism. Democratic socialism was popularised by socialists who opposed the backsliding towards a one-party state in the Soviet Union and other nations during the 20th century.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, Post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to post-Leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.
Norman Long is a British anthropologist. He has conducted important fieldwork and made significant theoretical contributions through his application of insights from social anthropology in development studies. Anthropology was, in the wake of decolonisation, often seen as tainted by colonialism and not relevant in development discourse. Long offered another perspective that was unbound by time and place. He advocated an actor-oriented perspective on development and thus formulated a critique on centralist biases in development theory.
Medical sociology is the sociological analysis of medical organizations and institutions; the production of knowledge and selection of methods, the actions and interactions of healthcare professionals, and the social or cultural effects of medical practice. The field commonly interacts with the sociology of knowledge, science and technology studies, and social epistemology. Medical sociologists are also interested in the qualitative experiences of patients, often working at the boundaries of public health, social work, demography and gerontology to explore phenomena at the intersection of the social and clinical sciences. Health disparities commonly relate to typical categories such as class and race. Objective sociological research findings quickly become a normative and political issue.
Health politics or politics of health is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with the analysis of social and political power over the health status of individuals.
Robert Chapman is an English philosopher, teacher and writer, best known for their work on neurodiversity studies and the philosophy of disability.