Keynote speaker

Klasien Horstman

Where are the publics of public health? Reframing problems of 'reach'

Public health is intrinsically connected to the public domain, and hence is expected to stimulate notions of citizenship and to attune to the everyday life worlds of people. (Horstman, 2013). However, the importance given to scientific evidence versus clinical expertise or patients' and citizens experiences, suggests a focus on technocratic approaches to improving public health. To ensure that public health will become ‘public’ again and will incorporate diverse citizens voices, it is required to reflect on its current paradigm and to develop new paradigms that imagine and perform new relationships between public health and the communities it aims to work for.

Bio
Klasien Horstman was trained as a philosophical and historical sociologist at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Between 2001 and 2009 she was Socrates Professor in Philosophy and Ethics of Bioengineering at Eindhoven University of Technology and since 2009 she has been professor of Philosophy of Public Health at Maastricht University. Since 2015 she is leading the interdisciplinary research line Inequity, Participation, Globalisation, one of the 6 research lines of the Care and Public Health Research Institute CAPHRI , in the Faculty Health, Medicine and Life Sciences. She studies the dynamics of science, politics and culture in public health practices: from (workplace) health promotion to healthy neighborhoods, vaccination and AMR prevention.