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Staff Profile

Professor Ted Schrecker

Emeritus Professor of Global Health Policy

  • Address: Saint John, New Brunswick E2J 5C3 CANADA

Background

INTRODUCTION

I am a political scientist by background, and moved from Canada to take up a position at Durham University in June, 2013 before transferring to Newcastle University with colleagues from Durham's School of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health in 2017. My research interests focus on the political economy of health inequalities, especially as they are affected by neoliberal globalisation, and on issues at the interface of science, ethics, law and public policy. (See Research tab for more detail.) Earlier in my working life, I spent many years involved with environmental policy and law as a legislative researcher, academic and consultant. A link to my blog 'Health as if Everybody Counted - second edition is available here. I am Emeritus Professor as of 1 October 2022.

ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Member (2015-17), Independent Panel on Global Governance for Health

Co-editor (2014-2019), Journal of Public Health (received Faculty of Public Health Service Award, December 2019)

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

  • Globalisation
  • Global health
  • Neoliberalism
  • Political economy
  • Social determinants of health
  • Global (health) justice
  • Global health in the Anthropocene/planetary health

RECENT PREVIOUS POSITIONS

  • 2013-2017: Professor of Global Health Policy, Durham University
  • 2012-2013: Clinical Scientist, Bruyere Research Institute, Ottawa, Ontario
  • 2011-2014: Adjunct Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine, University of Ottawa
  • 2005-2011: Scientist (Associate Professor rank), Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine and Principal Scientist, Institute of Population Health, University of Ottawa
  • 2003-2004: Research Associate, Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit, University of Saskatchewan
  • 2002-2003: Associate Scientist, Lawson Health Research Institute, London, Ontario
  • 2000-2002: Full-time consultant and Associate Member, Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, McGill University

Google Scholar: Click here.

Research

BASIC PRINCIPLES GUIDING RESEARCH AND INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT

Political economy of health

'[A]nalysis of causes of disease distribution requires attention to the political and economic structures, processes and power relationships that produce societal patterns of health, disease, and wellbeing via shaping the conditions in which people live and work' (Nancy Krieger, 2011; emphasis in original).

Speaking truth about power (a play on Wildavsky's familiar description of the task of the policy analyst)

A fine illustration:‘[U]nequal distribution of health-damaging experiences is not in any sense a “natural” phenomenon but is the result of a toxic combination of poor social policies and programmes, unfair economic arrangements, and bad politics’ (Commission on Social Determinants of Health, 2008).


MAJOR THEMES GOING FORWARD

Neoliberal epidemics

Clare Bambra’s and my book How Politics Makes Us Sick: Neoliberal Epidemics (2015) was reviewed as [b]oth sophisticated and accessible to non-specialist audiences …. Schrecker and Bambra marshal solid, cross-national evidence and clear arguments to make a compelling and incriminatory case against neoliberalism and the epidemics it has engendered’ in The Lancet. Key research directions:

  • Advancing understanding of public finance as a public health issue (perhaps the most important take-home message of all) by way of
  • Continued description of the destructive consequences of neoliberal policies for health (most recently in the Newcastle area, with a 'research apprentice' from the School of Psychology
  • Comparative multidisciplinary research on the politics of support for redistributive policies that can reduce health inequalities, and on
  • Why some settings are ‘resource-scarce’ and others not.
  • Relentlessly challenging ‘lifestyle drift’ in health policy, research and intervention design.

The politics of evidence

Four decades of scholarship on standards of proof in environmental policy and law have had surprisingly little influence in other areas of population health research. So we need first of all to ask

  • How much evidence is enough for acting on social determinants of health and health inequalities (the standard of proof issue)? What are relevant guiding principles? Who should decide?

Extractive industries and health

This is work I have been undertaking with Canadian colleague Anne-Emanuelle Birn and others, as part of the work of what is now the Collective for the Political Determinants of Health. We have published one overview article in Health & Place; two articles that focus on Canadian firms' mining activity in Latin America and the Caribbean; and a chapter in an edited volume. We draw on Saskia Sassen's work on "logics of extraction" to develop a more expansive definition of extractive industries than is customary to include not only mining, oil and gas but also (for example) large scale land acquisitions by foreign investors and governments and some forms of tropical timber 'harvesting'. Such activities are increasingly part of global commodity or value chains dominated by transnational corporations, and their direct and indirect health impacts remain seriously under-studied.

Population health in a new, darker (post-democratic?) future

The overarching theme here is captured in David Rieff's 1993 description of how globalisation had transformed Los Angeles that is now a quarter-century old: ‘After all, nobody got up one balmy afternoon on the Capitoline Hill sometime in the fifth century and said that the Roman empire was over and the Dark Ages had begun’. In other words, population health must now come to grips with the potential existence of multiple tipping points. Key trends that require exploration in terms of their implications for population health:

  • The shift from public to private power associated with rising economic inequality and ultra-wealth; transnational corporations; financialisation, tax avoidance and global financial flows; philanthro-capitalism.
  • Global health in the Anthropocene age, with climate change being only one of multiple challenges.
  • How to understand and react to the drift towards what Fareed Zakaria has called ‘illiberal democracy’ and the spread of authoritarianism. 
  • What can be learned about the challenges of reducing health inequalities in other jurisdictions from the prospect of a poorer, meaner, more unequal and inward-looking post-Brexit United Kingdom.
  • Reconstructing lost political vocabularies: exploring the consequences of the near-disappearance from academic discourse of the concepts of state terror and corporate crime.

Although I retired as of 30 September 2022, I will continue to be delighted to hear from colleagues and students interested in these themes and challenges.


Teaching

A REFLECTION ON THE ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITY

Philip Slayton, a retired Canadian legal scholar, has written an observation about the importance of universities, part of which is worth quoting at length:

'A curious and well-informed mind is a free mind, and a person with a free mind is a free person; creating this free person is what education, particularly postsecondary education, is meant to do. Universities need to reject a corporate consumer-driven model; a student is not a “client.” Universities must eschew misguided vocationalism, emphasize the development of critical thinking – in particular, the ability to distinguish between a good argument and a bad argument – and recognize that society needs dreamers at least as much as technicians. They need a fee structure that makes postsecondary education available to all without career-distorting long-term debt. And they need to welcome the expression of all views, even extreme ones.'


TEACHING

After moving to Newcastle University in 2017, I led Masters-level modules on Global Health and on Advanced Social Determinants of Health in the Faculty of Medical Sciences, and made substantial contributions to modules on Public Policy, Health and Health Inequalities and on Global Health in the Anthropocene. These have been taken over by colleagues following my retirement, but I remain glad to exchange ideas with students and colleagues. In Canada, I taught political science, environmental studies and Canadian studies at the undergraduate level and population health in an interdisciplinary doctoral programme.

Publications