In the field of public health, politics are only of interest insofar as a tool for explaining the uneven distribution health. I argue in this commentary that this limited conception of politics can foreclose opportunities to understand the spatial, historical, and relational contexts through which community patterns of politics emerge. I explore Vietnamese American conservatism as a case how we might think about public health not only as a set of outcomes, but also as a worldview that motivates the choices that people and their collectives make, within the constraints of colonialism and imperialism, to protect their health and wellbeing. I conclude by discussing how person-centered ethnographic methods offers both an epistemic and a methodological openness that can accommodate a capacious concept of public health that takes seriously rich, complex, layered stories that can give us clues to understanding how politics and health actually matter to people. • Public health researchers should consider an expansive concept of politics. • Politics can include the spatial, historical, and relational contexts through which ideologies emerge. • Politics is important at both individual and structural levels. • Person-centered ethnography can augment current public health qualitative tools to share genuinely open-ended stories.
Emma Tran (Thu,) studied this question.