Dynamics of health and welfare: texts and contexts

Abstract

The book that is now being presented is a result from work developed in the scope of a project within the Alfa Programme (Exchange Programme between Universities of the European Union and Latin America), integrated into EuropeAid – Cooperation Office Latin America Directorate, and financed by the European Commission, between 2005 and 2007. Entitled Graph – Graduate Programme in the Social Dynamics of Health, the members of the project were the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Patrice Bourdelais), the Colegio de México (Guillermo Palacios), the universities of Évora (Laurinda Abreu), Granada (Teresa Ortiz-Gómes), Nacional de Luján (José Luis Moreno), La Habana (Mariana Ravanet Ramírez), Linköping (Jan Sundin), Mannheim (Martin Dinges), Peruana Cayetano Heredia (Marcos Cueto), the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de S. Paulo (Denise Bernuzzi de Sant’Anna) and the Asociación Médica Argentina (Vicente Enrique Mazzafero Martín). Designed as a textbook especially destined for post-graduate students, the main purpose of this book is to make access easier to a diversified set of documents considered of great significance to illustrate relevant content in terms of health and welfare dynamics. The book is organized into three parts (Health and Welfare; Perspectives on Gender and Health; Migration, Urbanization and Health), that start with a general introduction to the subject, followed by a small presentation, and in some cases, problematization, of the documents. Each chapter ends with a bibliographic list of the most recent and/or most important titles, according to the chapter authors’ perspective, for the subject in analysis. Issues in Europe and Latin America are the focus of the book. The linguistic diversity of the project partners was assumed as an added-value that we wanted to preserve, not only taking into account the book’s potential public-target – students, researchers and professors of diverse countries, with expertise in several languages – but also as a way to escape from the imposition of a singlely language for science, without obviously denying the importance of the English as an international language.