What does One Health want? Feminist, posthuman, and anti-colonial possibilities

Abstract

What does One Health want? Despite its touted interdisciplinarity, to date there has been limited engagement with the social sciences and humanities – in particular with streams of critical social theory that enable a response to this question. In this paper we draw on the critical social sciences to consider how One Health is defined, conceptualized, and positioned, and discuss what we see as vital challenges within One Health that both limit its potential for meaningful change and contribute to a potential for ongoing harm – namely, medicalization, anthropocentrism, and colonial-capitalism. We then advance three areas in the critical social sciences that hold potential for addressing these challenges – feminist, posthuman, and anti-colonial approaches. By doing so we seek to encourage a deeper transdisciplinarity within One Health – one that is open to a genuine engagement with insights from critical social theory and a re-orientation towards more creative and radical re-imaginings in the service of wellbeing for diverse peoples, animals, other beings, and the land.