Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies

While often seen as a characteristic of individuals and their bodies, health is also collectively produced through social practices and economic and political systems. How we ‘treat’ health, then, must move beyond focusing on individuals to instead encompass a more multidimensional approach.

Through dynamic teamwork, and underpinned by a deeply collaborative philosophy, the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, a Flagship Centre of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, draws together leading experts from around the world and across a diverse set of disciplines and fields.

Synthesising different disciplinary approaches across scales of observation from the microbial to the planetary, the work of the Centre highlights how historical context, political arrangements, economic structures, enduring inequalities, and interspecies and environmental relations both produce health problems and might map paths to new solutions.

Emphasising complexity and connectedness, we provide a platform for radically reimagining what health is and how it might be better provided for—for humans, other species, our environment and the planet.