How Neoliberalism Sneaks into Critical Public Health

Ten years ago I co-authored an article (with Lindo Bacon) where we unintentionally gave neoliberalism a stamp of approval. Our bad. You can read more here. It’s relevant today because it’s still being used to support a critical public health approach intent on ending oppression. But because the error remains unexamined the approach isn’t in fact anti-oppressive.

Worse, because it seems like there’s no case to answer, it stops actual anti-oppressive practice and theory gaining ground and so stabilises the medical-academic-industrial complex.

That’s worrying, right?

The article advocates an approach, HAES, that tackles fat stigma, making it very different from mainstream services — a literal life saver for some fat people. That could explain why it escapes deep (ontological) critique. But the lack of scrutiny doesn’t do anyone any favours, except people well served by the medical-academic-industrial complex I guess.

To be fair, we can brush off the need for questioning for other reasons. Sometimes it can be really really hard even to imagine that a different way of thinking is possible. It’s not that we’re consciously suppressing the possibility we could be wrong, more that we’re so much in the groove of binary thinking that something useful and different lies beyond what we can…