From the functional ratio between environment and health to other epistemologies in Health Geography based on the existence/resistence of popular knowledge

Abstract

This article discusses other epistemologies in Health Geography in Brazil based on the analysis of theses and dissertations produced in Brazil that deal with the subject, between the years 1987 and 2018. Methodologically, the spreadsheets made available by CAPES were tabulated and the keywords and the expressions that integrate the respective titles of the researches were quantified and organized in clouds of words with the support of specific software. The result reveals, in the period, an inclination of Geography to discuss specific diseases (especially dengue), the environmental issue, the urban space, also the predilection for the concept of territory and a recent attempt to understand the country's health services, with emphasis on for debates involving the SUS. Furthermore, there is a concentration of production in the South and Southeast regions. In this sense, we work with the proposal of an inter/transdisciplinary action that can increase such discussions with precepts of decolonial thinking, especially bringing to the geographic agenda other knowledge and practices that have been made invisible/silenced by centrality of science. Thus, the bet is to relate the well-being and the perspective of degrowth as necessary tools to overcome the crisis of the civilization model, addressing geographical perspectives in this sense and to another scale of social understanding, which can reveal absences and emergencies.