Social Justice

In its origins, public health was heavily influenced by social justice. As a field, public health emerged from the social justice reform efforts of the 19th century and, in its early stages, was able to achieve huge social advances. These advances helped to set the preconditions for how we think about population health today. This included issuing sanitation codes to improve the standard of living for all, abolishing child labor, and establishing the eight-hour workday. These advances required using a structural lens to identify the drivers of poor health outcomes, like infectious diseases, for large swaths of the population. However, not everyone benefited from them equally. And as the years progressed and the field evolved, public health has moved further away from its roots.1

In this course, we explore these origins and contemporary public health practice using a social justice movement lens. Together we will learn about social justice as a concept, its key principles, and common threads that currently tie social justice movements together with public health. We then explore the role of public health in these movements, as well as collective strategies to achieve the conditions needed for optimal health for all.