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KMID : 1138720080340010001
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Korean Public Health Research
2008 Volume.34 No. 1 p.1 ~ p.9
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Globalization and Self-Identity of Public Health Professionals in Korea
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Lee Jong-Chan
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Abstract
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At the time when quarantine sovereignty has become the discursive topic of Korean society in 2008, I try to investigate what globalization means for Korea’s public health professionals. Korean people’s risk perception of mad cow disease will provide a frame of reference for their way of responding to the prevalence of avian influenza and new diseases due to climate change. In considering that the first ’unification by the globe,’ had occurred not through politico-economical events but in the name of the Black Death, it is no surprise that public health problems of the twenty-first century take on the global characters. Public health studies have been essentially regarded as a sort of unification discipline whose raison d’etre is to merge humanities and social science with natural science and health care. In this respect, Korea’s public health professionals are so Americanized that they do not even recognize their ways of framing public health are heavily Americanized. To overcome ’American exceptionalism’ that is no exception to public health, I would argue that they must more collaborate with Asian counterparts, instead of exclusively relying on the American paradigm of knowledge. Their self-identity in an era of globalization will derive from their capacity for combining health care and natural science with history and philosophy of public health and a variety of social science disciplines. Locating public health in the whole context is essential for constructing the identity of Korean health professionals.
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KEYWORD
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Globalization, Pubic Health Professionals, Quarantine Sovereignty, Epidemic Diseases, Climate, American Exceptionalism, Unification Discipline
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