ABSTRACT
The Routledge Handbook of Critical Issues in Health and Illness is intended to provide a coherent volume of interdisciplinary scholarly work that brings a critical view to key contemporary issues in health and illness. Designed for scholars, students, researchers, and professionals working across a wide range of disciplines and areas, it is unique in offering an extensive range of different – and critical – theoretical perspectives, commentaries, and analyses on key topics that are highly relevant to health and illness around the globe. We argue that such a resource is overdue; many of the topics require critical perspectives to advance complex health issues and address inequitable patterns of illness and ill health. Utilising multidisciplinary approaches that consider power and broader social structures in health and illness outcomes is especially important at the current time. This chapter briefly outlines what is meant by critical perspectives and approaches, and how such perspectives can challenge standard perspectives that entrench inequalities, make change difficult, and reinforce the status quo. The chapter then outlines the three parts of the Handbook that are structured around the different contexts in which health and illness play out, providing a brief account of each.
