In this current environment, it is urgent to understand how oppression and health are closely connected. Oppression: A Social Determinant of Health offers a thorough and accessible overview of the root or structural causes of ill health, such as capitalism, globalization, colonialism, medicalization and neoliberalism. The contributors to this volume insist that the key to tackling these structural forces is understanding and changing oppressive practices that cause ill health, thus reframing growing health inequities within the scope of moral responsibility and social change. This thoroughly updated second edition contains contributions from internationally recognized experts in the field of critical social science analyses in health systems and health sciences studies. New chapters provide timely discussions about oppression, Treaty Rights, Big Pharma, the Anthropocene and the COVID-19 pandemic. This book provides a comprehensive overview of core ideas for investigating how oppression “gets under the skin” to perpetuate health inequities.

Teaching Learning Guide and Action Toolkit available upon request

Elizabeth McGibbon is a professor in the Faculty of Science at St. Francis Xavier University. Her publications describe how public policy created Oppression deepens disadvantage and heightens privilege to create and sustain intergenerational health damage. An invited author in eight multiple edition books about critical applications in health, she authored (with Josephine Etowa) the first Canadian book to tackle health care racism: Anti-Racist Health Care Practice.

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The author has produced an excellent work that offers an accurate depiction of power relations as they relate to health from a paradigm consistent with many in the field of the social determinants of health, especially health promoters. It would be beneficial if more health professionals, students and members of the public alike became aware of the critical thinking present in this book.

Lexy Smith-Doughty, College Quarterly