The lifecourse of place: Looking past paradigms and metaphors to the just nature of place-health – A rejoinder to Andrews’

Some twenty years ago Baum (1995, p.464) wrote in this journal that “Public health has … both to describe and to understand communities”. To achieve these objectives she recommended that public health research “should adopt a social view of health [and] not be dogmatically dominated by any one discipline or method” (Baum, 1995, p.466). We agree, though not simply as researchers with a vested interest in public health, but as researchers each with their own disciplinary backgrounds.Elsewhere we have discussed the value of an engaged discourse that spans disciplinary bounds as important to efforts that aim to understand, enable and promote population levels of health (Lekkas and Stankov, 2014). Moreover, we have argued for an ideal where knowledge and understanding are progressed through dialogue and inquiry enacted from positions of opposition (Lekkas and Stankov, 2014). These values mirror an objective of this journal; a journal noted for “publishing material that crosses disciplinary boundaries”, while recognising that as it does “problems [may] arise from differences between academic disciplines … in the questions they find interesting, [and] the approaches and methods they use to answer these questions” (Macintyre, 2000, p.1)