I can stomach framing my work through the lens of "social justice" and even "health equity," but it still turns my stomach to say that my work is about the "social determinants of health." It's one of my least favorite public health frameworks.

In my experience, it is public health people talking about how bad things are for a certain group (giving an account of "social determinants") and then offering, like, results of a study about some app on a wearable device designed to monitor hypertension and "nudge" users.

Many people conceptualize "social determinants of health" as a way to get social justice concerns into conservative areas of public health and biomedical sciences.

I see it more as a process of the health sciences taking ideas related to equity and then watering them down.

Being able to offer an account of a problem is different than addressing the root of that problem, and work that isn't trying to do the second does not interest me.

These thoughts are not new, but are manifesting tonight because of a proposal that I'm writing.

In the body, I'm wondering if I want to use the language of SDOH, critique SDOH, or just leave SDOH alone.

The molecular turn in infectious disease work has huge implications for how epidemiologists and other stakeholders conceptualize the social, and thus what constitutes SDOH.

Probably going to leave it alone for the purposes of this application.