Ilse Dijkstra (BA European Public Health) has won the 2020 ESST Essay Prize. Her winning paper is entitled “Known to be Unhealthy” – How Social Epidemiology Produces Health Differences.
The ESST Undergraduate Essay Prize is an annual prize of €500 awarded to the best-submitted paper on some aspect of science, technology and society relations.
Inspired and informed by contemporary research within Science and Technology Studies (STS), Dijkstra discusses how social epidemiological research serves to create and produce health inequalities in society rather than objectively measure and discover them. Focusing in particular on how social epidemiology establishes the relationship between socio-economic status and health, Dijkstra examines how the accumulation of different studies relying on different indicators and measures results in the construction of new facts and generalisations concerning the health of people with higher or lower incomes and education in society. By identifying groups “known to be unhealthy” Dijkstra presents social epidemiology as participating in the co-production of science and society helping to construct the social and political infrastructures underlying policy decisions. To increase awareness within social epidemiology of the politics of its own knowledge practices, Dijkstra concludes by recommending new interdisciplinary collaborations, for example, with STS scholars and medical sociologists.
The aim of the ESST Undergraduate Essay Prize is to attract further aspiring young students to the interdisciplinary fields of Science and Technology Studies and Innovation Studies. Undergraduates from all fields of study attending any European university are eligible to apply.
