Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Social justice is routinely identified as a central value for public health practice. For example, 'a commitment to social justice' is included in the Public Health Agency of Canada's statement on the core competencies necessary for the practice of public health. Public health's social justice motivation is central to explicitly considering which populations are being included and excluded from public health solutions, and who will benefit and who will be harmed. Yet, it is often unclear as to what a commitment to social justice requires in the context of public health and how this ought to translate into policy, practice, and research. Indeed, the concept of social justice often precludes a single (or simple) interpretation or application given the value's rich pedigree in moral and political philosophy, which means that a commitment to social justice in practice might tend to refer to diverse, if not divergent, views about the goals and obligations of public health. If social justice is to play a central role in public health, then its features ought to be examined so that it may provide robust, consistent, and practicable ethical guidance for policy and practice. This presentation will report findings from a qualitative study that involved key informant interviews with public health policy-makers in two distinct domains of public health-chronic disease prevention and public health emergency preparedness and response-which were conducted with the aim of achieving contextual understanding of how social justice is conceptualized and negotiated in public health practice and to capture whether different norms of social justice obtain in different public health contexts. It is the goal of this empirical research, which uses an analytic lens informed by philosophical accounts of social justice, to contribute to both ethical theory and practice by providing a deeper contextual understanding of how social justice is conceptualized and negotiated in practice.