Ben Brisbois

• PhD
• Professor (Adjunct) at University of Northern British Columbia

As awareness grows of the catastrophic implications of global environmental change, multiple scholarly fields addressing health-environment relationships have advocated 'transformative' educational strategies. Holistic Indigenous health-environment models inspire and inform many such efforts, but related land-based learning initiatives involving un...

Despite self-congratulatory rhetoric, Canada compromised COVID-19 vaccine equity with policies impeding a proposed global waiver of vaccine intellectual property (IP) rules. To learn from Canada’s vaccine nationalism we explore the worldview – a coherent textual picture of the world – in a sample of Government of Canada communications regarding glo...

Background Collective agreement about the importance of centering equity in health research, practice, and policy is growing. Yet, responsibility for advancing equity is often situated as belonging to a vague group of ‘others’, or delegated to the leadership of ‘equity-seeking’ or ‘equity-deserving’ groups who are tasked to lead systems transformat...

Background In 2008, Ecuador introduced Plan Nacional para el Buen Vivir (PNBV; National Plan for Good Living), which was widely recognized as a promising example of Health in All Policies (HiAP) due to the integration of policy sectors on health and health equity objectives. PBNV was implemented through three successive plans (2009–2013, 2013–2017,...

Background Global health partnerships (GHPs) are situated in complex political and economic relationships and involve partners with different needs and interests (e.g., government agencies, non-governmental organizations, corporations, universities, professional associations, philanthropic organizations and communities). As part of a mixed methods...

Patterns of research on resource extraction’s health effects display problematic gaps and underlying assumptions, indicating a need to situate health knowledge production in the context of disciplinary, corporate and neocolonial influences and structures. This paper reports on a modified metanarrative synthesis of ‘storylines’ of research on resour...

Scholarship on the health impacts of resource extraction displays prominent gaps and apparent corporate and neocolonial footprints that raise questions about how science is produced. We analyze production of knowledge, on the health impacts of mining, carried out in relation to the Canadian International Resources and Development Institute (CIRDI),...

Global health partnerships (GHPs) are situated in complex political and economic relationships and involve partners with different needs and interests (e.g., government agencies, non-governmental organizations, corporations, universities, professional associations, philanthropic organizations and communities). As part of a mixed methods study desig...

Pesticide-related health impacts in Ecuador's banana industry illustrate the need to understand science's social production in the context of major North-South inequities. This paper explores colonialism's ongoing context-specific relationships to science, and what these imply for population health inquiry and praxis. Themes in postcolonial science...

As cities grow and thrive, urban populations have access to more resources and better health than has ever been the case in human history. However, at the same time, the material gaps between the haves and have-nots are also starker in cities, where large populations live in close proximity, than they are anywhere else. These social divides map ont...

Work that addresses the cumulative impacts of resource extraction on environment, community, and health is necessarily large in scope. This paper presents experiences from initiating research at this intersection and explores implications for the ambitious, integrative agenda of planetary health. The purpose is to outline origins, design features,...

Current research has been described as inadequate to understand and manage complex social and ecological influences of resource extraction on health. We conducted a scoping review of research on mining or oil & gas extraction and health, to identify patterns and gaps in existing scholarship. Journal articles, peer-reviewed books and book sections p...

As mudanças ambientais antrópicas despertaram a atenção para a importância dos ecossistemas como fundamentais para sustentar a saúde e o bem-estar humanos. Várias escolas de pensamento e campos de atuação em pesquisa e ação buscam compreender a saúde e os fenômenos sociais e ecológicos associados. Apresentamos 18 desses campos de atuação destacando...

Reschny J, Brisbois B, Parkes MW, Harder H (Lead Authors) Allison S, Buse C, Daniels T, Dolan S, Fumerton F, Fyfe T, Kutzner D, McLean E, Oke B, Nowak N, Schmeisser A (Contributing Authors). (2017). Towards a better understanding of health in relation to mining and oil & gas extraction: A scoping review. Prepared for Northern Health Authority, Prin...

The impacts of global environmental change have precipitated numerous approaches that connect the health of ecosystems, non-human organisms and humans. However, the proliferation of approaches can lead to confusion due to overlaps in terminology, ideas and foci. Recognising the need for clarity, this paper provides a guide to seven field developmen...

Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) represent a new way to finance social service and health promotion programs whereby different types of investors provide an upfront investment of capital. If a given program meets predetermined criteria for a successful outcome, the government pays back investors with interest. Introduced in the United Kingdom in 2010, SI...

Representations of the world enable global health research (GHR), discursively constructing sites in which studies can legitimately take place. Depoliticized portrayals of the global South frequently obscure messy legacies of colonialism and motivate technical responses to health problems with political and economic root causes. Such problematic re...

Political ecology pushes back against the apolitical and ahistorical ecologies frequently found in mainstream scientific accounts of nature and the environment, and has increasingly focused on how scientific knowledge is 'socially constructed.' In this article, we argue for political ecological engagement with the highly influential knowledge-to-ac...

Pesticide exposure in Ecuador's banana industry reflects political economic and ecological processes that interact across scales to affect human health. We use this case study to illustrate opportunities for applying political ecology of health scholarship in the burgeoning field of global health. Drawing on an historical literature review and ethn...

p>Funding options for global health research prominently include grants from corporations, as well as from foundations linked to specific corporations. While such funds can enable urgently-needed research and interventions, they can carry the risk of skewing health research priorities and exacerbating health inequities. With the objective of promot...

Public health responses to agricultural pesticide exposure are often informed by ethnographic or other qualitative studies of pesticide risk perception. In addition to highlighting the importance of structural determinants of exposure, such studies can identify the specific scales at which pesticide-exposed individuals locate responsibility for the...

There has been growing policy interest in social justice issues related to both health and food. We sought to understand the state of knowledge on relationships between health equity-i.e. health inequalities that are socially produced-and food systems, where the concepts of 'food security' and 'food sovereignty' are prominent. We undertook explorat...

The growth of the field of global health has prompted renewed interest in discursive aspects of North–South biomedical encounters, but analysis of the role of disciplinary identities and writing conventions remains scarce. In this article, I examine ways of framing pesticide problems in 88 peer-reviewed epidemiology papers produced by Northerners a...

Over the last two decades, the science of climate change's theoretical impacts on vector-borne disease has generated controversy related to its methodological validity and relevance to disease control policy. Critical social science analysis, drawing on science and technology studies and the sociology of social movements, demonstrates consistency b...