January 22, 2015
At the center of her work is the question of health: what it is, who it's for, and who decides. Working in a rural, Zulu-speaking area of South Africa, Abby understands health as always simultaneously material and symbolic; that is, she sees health as the interplay between physiological processes (bacteria interacting with cells), cultural contexts (the views and values of the community in which a person lives), social networks (family and friends on the one hand and health care on the other), and political-economic structures. To understand health, she takes an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the work of geographers, anthropologists, historians, epidemiologists, and medical scientists.
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