Geographies of Health, Disease and Well-being ─ Recent Advances in Theory and Method

This book is a collection of papers reflecting the latest advances in geographic research on health, disease, and well-being. It spans a wide range of topics, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies - including anti-racism, post-colonialism, spatial statistics, spatiotemporal modeling, political ecology, and social network analysis. Health issues in various regions of the world are addressed by interdisciplinary authors, who include scholars from epidemiology, medicine, public health, demography, and community studies. The book covers the major themes in this field such as health inequalities; environmental health; spatial analysis and modeling of disease; health care provision, access, and utilization; health and wellbeing; and global/transnational health and health issues in the global south. There is also a specially commissioned book review in addition to the chapters included in these six sections. Together, these chapters show cogently how geographic perspectives and methods can contribute in significant ways to advancing our understanding of the complex interactions between social and physical environments and health behaviors and outcomes.

This book was published as a special issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Mei-Po Kwan is Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A health/urban geographer with a focus on environmental health, mobility and health, and application of advanced geospatial methods in health research, she has received several prestigious research awards and garnered substantial research support from sources including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.