Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Guest
Field Note
One of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity among children under
the age of fi ve in developing countries is waterborne disease. My research has
focused on building an understanding of the factors that contribute to the
vulnerability of young children to this signifi cant public health problem. I have
conducted my research in communities located in the relatively remote Kara-
koram Range of northern Pakistan. Of interest to me is the microenvironment
of water-related disease risk, and in particular, the factors at the household and
local scale that infl uence the prevalence and severity of childhood illness. One
of the primary methodological strategies that I employ in this research involves
household microstudies, which entail in-depth interviews with family members
(primarily mothers who are the principal child health providers), child health
histories, and structured observations. One of the most important fi ndings of
this research in these mountain communities, in my opinion, is that the educa-
tion, social networks, and empowerment of women are all critical to breaking
the cycle of disease impacts and to ensuring long-term child survival.
Credit: Sarah J. Halvorson, University of Montana
Figure 5.14
Statistics showing how much women produce and
how little their work is valued are undoubtedly interest-
ing. Yet, the work geographers who study gender have
done goes far beyond the accumulation of such data. Since
the 1980s, geographers have asked why society talks about
women and their roles in certain ways and how these ideas,
heard and represented throughout our lives, affect geo-
graphic circumstances and how we understand them. For
example, Ann Oberhauser and her co-authors explained
that people in the West tend to think that women are
employed in the textile and jewelry-making fi elds in
poorer countries because the women in these regions
are “more docile, submissive, and tradition bound” than
women in more prosperous parts of the world. A geogra-
pher studying gender asks where these ideas about women
come from and how they infl uence women's work possi-
bilities and social positions in different places—key ele-
ments in making places what they are.
infl uenced by geographically specifi c social and envi-
ronmental circumstances.
Fieldwork is often the best way to understand how
power structures in society create vulnerable groups at
the local scale, and how those vulnerable groups might be
affected by particular developments. Through fi eldwork
and interviews, geographers can see differences in vulner-
ability within groups of people.
Geographer Sarah Halvorson, for example, studied
differences in the vulnerabilities of children in northern
Pakistan. She examined the vulnerability of children to
diarrheal diseases by paying attention to “constructions of
gender, household politics, and gendered relationships that
perpetuate inherent inequalities and differences between
men and women and within and between social groups.”
Halvorson studied 30 families, 15 of whom had a
low frequency of diarrhea and dysentery and 15 of whom
had a high frequency of these diseases. Through her fi eld-
work, Halvorson came to understand that several tangible
resources, including income and housing, and several intan-
gible resources, such as social status and position within the
family structure, all infl uenced the vulnerability of children
to diarrheal diseases in northern Pakistan. Halvorson found
that people with higher incomes generally had lower disease
rates, but that income was not the only relevant factor (Fig.
5.14). The least vulnerable children and women were those
who had higher incomes and an established social network
of support. In cases where income was low, if a woman had a
strong social network, her children were more likely to be in
the low-disease group.
Geographer Joseph Oppong recognized that the spa-
tial analysis of a disease can reveal what populations are most
vulnerable in a country. In North America and Europe,
Vulnerable Populations
Power relations can have a fundamental impact on
which populations or areas are particularly vulner-
able to disease, death, injury, or famine. Geographers
use mapping and spatial analysis to predict and explain
what populations or people will be affected most by
natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes, hurri-
canes, and tsunamis or by environmental policies. The
study of vulnerability requires thinking geographically
because not all people and places are affected in the
same way by social, political, economic, or environ-
mental change. Rather, vulnerability is fundamentally
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