Social research on neglected diseases of poverty: Continuing and emerging themes

Copyright: © 2009 Manderson et al.Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) exist and persist for social and economic reasons that enable the vectors and pathogens to take advantage of changes in the behavioral and physical environment. Persistent poverty at household, community, and national levels, and inequalities within and between sectors, contribute to the perpetuation and re-emergence of NTDs. Changes in production and habitat affect the physical environment, so that agricultural development, mining and forestry, rapid industrialization, and urbanization all result in changes in human uses of the environment, exposure to vectors, and vulnerability to infection. Concurrently, political instability and lack of resources limit the capacity of governments to manage environments, control disease transmission, and ensure an effective health system. Social, cultural, economic, and political factors interact and influence government capacity and individual willingness to reduce the risks of infection and transmission, and to recognize and treat disease. Understanding the dynamic interaction of diverse factors in varying contexts is a complex task, yet critical for successful health promotion, disease prevention, and disease control. Many of the research techniques and tools needed for this purpose are available in the applied social sciences. In this article we use this term broadly, and so include behavioral, population and economic social sciences, social and cultural epidemiology, and the multiple disciplines of public health, health services, and health policy and planning. These latter fields, informed by foundational social science theory and methods, include health promotion, health communication, and heath education

Feminist solidarity?:Women's engagement in politics and the implications for water management in the Darjeeling Himalaya

This article explores the motivations of a diverse group of women in the Himalayan region of Darjeeling district in India to engage (or not) in politics, and discusses how women, like men, are vulnerable to power and politics. In Darjeeling, class, ethnicity, and other divides are accentuated by unresolved, decades-long identity-based political conflicts that also obscure practical everyday needs and challenges. This defines which women engage in the political domain and, in the dominantly patriarchal political space, how these women relate to the region's enduring water challenges. In such a setting, it would be ideal to wish for solidarity among women that would overcome class and ethnic divisions and individual political aspirations, making space for gendering political causes and practical challenges. Such solidarity would be especially pertinent in the Eastern Himalaya, given the region's projected climate vulnerability and fragile democracy. However, reality is far removed from development discourse and policy which suggests an assumed camaraderie among mountain women: an imagined empathy and solidarity in relation both to environmental causes and concerns and the practice of equitable power and politics. In looking at how a diverse group of women in varying positions of power and powerlessness in Darjeeling District are unable, reluctant, or simply uninterested in addressing critical water injustices experienced by some, this paper calls for retrospection on both gender–environment myths and gender–politics fictions