Geography and health: The contemporary production of a diseased spatial theory

ABSTRACT The necessary - and under-stimulated - encounter between Geography and Health in contemporary academic production, reveals that science is also ailing. However, when it becomes possible to generate approximations, intersections, and dialogues between, for instance, the territorial interpretation of health-disease and the interpretation of health-disease from territorial determinations, conditions are created to, in a single act, establish a critique of science and the monopoly of health. As a result, this paper proposes the reflection of worker’s health as a link between territory and health. Field research, guidance of dissertations and doctorates, and participation in the Inter-Trade Union Forum on Health-labor-law/Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ-RJ), nourish the reflections elaborated in this article. The theoretical assumption is based on the following principle: worker’s health, as a field and a social issue, in defending public health, health as a right and justice, and, in criticizing all regimes of labor exploitation, under a territorial reading, gains strength in its praxis, as it clarifies that illness is implicated in the relationship between the spheres of power that, in capitalist society, are concerned with preserving and constituting social inequality, the monopoly of wealth, poverty, and violence. The fight for health, a fundamental good, becomes a struggle for territorial emancipation.