Our Collections

Moral frameworks for Public Health

By Nathalie Egalité and Allan Arturo González Estrada

This seminar examines some of the moral frameworks proposed or implemented for public health in two different contexts: those put forward by Frantz Fanon in the 1950s-60s, and those developed by philosophers shaping public health policy in 19th/early 20th century Costa Rica.  ​ 

​​Colonial Algeria, Social Medicine: Moral Imperatives in Fanon’s Physician Writing  

A key figure in postcolonial thought, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon wrote extensively about the effects of social determinants on the health of his patients, particularly looking into the impacts of colonialism, war, economic marginalisation, and repressive state interventions in Algeria. This seminar argues that distinct moral imperatives pertaining to public health and social medicine can be discerned in Fanon’s literary treatment of patients.  Fanon’s texts, embedded in a larger transformative project, remain morally instructive for contemporary evaluations of writing about public health.    

​​Epidemics and Ethics in Costa Rica  

A young Costa Rican republic witnessed two significant outbreaks of disease within the first 35 years of declaring independence. During that time, Costa Rica did not have an ethical framework for managing such significant public health crises. After José Maria Castro Madriz, first President of Costa Rica, developed a moral framework for many of the significant interventions of the mid-nineteenth century, new outbreaks challenged the more established state of the 20th century. As many public health measures were not easily accepted by many Costa Rican citizens, this created significant conflict between the state and the population. These ethical conflicts bear a striking resemblance to the world’s most recent public health crisis: SARS-CoV-2.  

Read more and watch the seminar here.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Ethics of Fieldwork in Northwest Pakistan

By Ping-hsiu Alice Lin

Photo: Ihtasham Ali

In the wake of the US-led and Pakistan-allied “war on terror”, residents in Northwest Pakistan have faced inconceivable structural and physical violence, in ways that pose ethical challenges in ethnographic writing and research. Over the last few decades, militancy, banditry and overall insecurity have hampered relief efforts in the area and significantly weakened basic infrastructure. In this article, the author illustrates how an initial security plan to undertake fieldwork research in this “volatile” region proved somewhat irrelevant because of her positionality, gender and race/ethnicity. The author explores the implications of these dynamics in contexts characterized by unequal gender relations and strict gender segregation. In addition, undertaking empirical work in the context of epistemological frameworks in a region that has been subjected to active conflict, militarised operations and a singular representation in the global and local media, poses other ethical challenges for anthropologists searching for new areas of study and decolonised models of representation. This paper reiterates the importance of a reflexive approach of ethics that acknowledges the interpenetration of race, gender and the thick web of relationships in the production of knowledge and is, at the same time, respectful of cultural specificity.

Read more here.

Seeds and Food Sovereignty

Eastern Himalayan Experiences

By Dixita Deka, Joel Rodrigues, Dolly Kikon, Bengt G. Karlsson, Sanjay Barbora and Meenal Tula

Crops and seeds are everywhere. They nourish our bodies, families, and communities, but are also taken for granted. Simultaneously, an increasing number of community organisations, farmer movements, and individuals are challenging corporate control and commodification of seeds. In the name of seed and food sovereignty, they seek to enhance local control over agriculture and ensure peoples’ rights to nutritious, ecologically-sound and culturally-appropriate food. In this book, the authors bring together resource persons, students, and researchers working across the Eastern Himalayan region, and, in doing so, they hope to facilitate new ways of learning together. The Eastern Himalayas are commonly characterised as a biodiversity hotspot, and this also applies to agrobiodiversity. The authors hope that this book will inspire further engagements with the ongoing farming initiatives and food sovereignty movements on the ground.

Read more here.

West African views of ethics and fairness in healthcare

By Ayodeji Adegbite and David Bannister

This seminar uses history to examine ideas of ethics and fairness from West Africa: Ayodeji Adegbite focuses on mid-20th century Nigeria to consider African challenges to the Euro-American ethics of global health, and David Bannister looks at the role of the past in shaping current views of fair healthcare in Ghana.​ 

The seminar focuses on two themes:

  1. ​​African medical practitioners and disease control in Africa: an ethical anchor for a decolonial global health   
  2. ​Fairness in Time: Generational experience and moral economies of state healthcare in Ghana  

Reas more and watch seminar here.

Social Exclusion and Care in Underclass Japan: Attunement as Techniques of Belonging

By Jieun Kim

While Japan boasts a universal healthcare system and state-of-the-art medical technology, healthcare has often been denied to those who do not conform to moral ideals of a deserving patient. In underclass enclaves known as yoseba (day laborers’ quarter), patients have been frequently turned away or blacklisted on grounds of their abnormality and non-compliance. As much as healthcare was enmeshed in the normative bonds of family and community sanctioned by the state, yoseba men were considered as outsiders who neglected their duties of care, thus, undeserving of any form of care themselves. Focusing on the struggle for healthcare in a yoseba enclave in Yokohama over the past three decades, this paper explores how various practices of care have been improvised in this last refuge for the underclass men. The relentless endeavor pursued by local medical activists reveals how attending to yoseba patients required creative techniques of spatio-temporal attunement to make healthcare a communal project. Here, a form of “embodied belonging” was sought through bodily care coordinated among various agents and things, rather than through claims for membership in a bounded entity.

Read more here.

The need for historical fluency in public health law and ethics

By Daniel S. Goldberg

In this seminar, Daniel S. Goldberg discusses the importance of understanding historical patterns of domination, oppression, and subordination to tackle health and social justice; the role of law as a social determinant of health; and the significance of historical fluency in public health law and ethics.  

The primary claim of this talk is that historical fluency is critical to effective scholarship and advocacy in public health law & ethics. In explaining such fluency and supporting this claim, several foundational ideas are relevant. First, law is a powerful social determinant of health. Historical analysis of population health problems connected to communicable disease, non-communicable disease, and injury helps demonstrate the deep connections between laws and health outcomes. Second, as to ethics, Powers & Faden’s health sufficiency model of social justice suggests that factors intensifying “densely-woven patterns of disadvantage” are of highest priority. Such factors are most responsible for expanding health inequities and they overwhelmingly track historical patterns of domination, oppression, and subordination. Taken together, these foundational ideas in public health law and public health ethics show why historical fluency is critical to advancing health and social justice. The final portion of the presentation will apply the analysis to a particular case study (the 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco, CA) to illustrate the significance of historical fluency in public health law & ethics. 

Read more and watch the seminar here.

The migrant’s time

By Ranajit Guha

Rethinking the concepts of migration and diaspora, Ranajit Guha focuses on the loss of one’s past and identity resulting from the temporal and spatial distortions imposed by migration. In addition to discussing the migrant’s status at the initial departure, Guha reflects on the migrant’s experience within the host community in the intensity of the immediate present. Suddenly ruptured from the continuity of their own roots, disoriented and with no insights in an incomprehensible present that has no before nor after, migrants are expected to struggle to build themselves a future and a new identity.

Read more here.

Revolution in the Third World

By Eqbal Ahmad

Eqbal Ahmad gave this speech on November 4, 1975 at the University of Michigan during the closing session of the three-day “Bicentennial Dilemma: Who’s in Control?” teach-in.

Maternal Mortality in Rural Bangladesh: Lessons Learned from Gonoshasthaya Kendra Programme Villages.

By Rafiqul Huda Chaudhury and Zafrullah Chowdhury

The present study examines the experiences and health care strategies of Gonoshasthaya Kendra (GK), the first NGO to tackle rural health care delivery in Bangladesh, in reducing maternal mortality. A close scrutiny of the GK experience shows that reduction in maternal mortality in rural Bangladesh is possible, even while keeping the place of delivery at home and at a low cost, with the support of trained traditional birth attendants provided (a) they are integrated into the formal rural health delivery system, through which they are linked with local-level-government trained health workers for effective supervision and referrals and (b) a system of accountability is institutionalized by which trained traditional birth attendants along with health workers are accountable to their supervisors and the community they serve through village health committees and local government. The GK experience of involving village-level trained paramedics and trained traditional birth attendants in the rendering of maternal and child care services can be replicated by the Government through improving skills of traditional birth attendants in pregnancy management through continuing in-service training and linking them with the existing reproductive health care systems. The finding calls for a fundamental shift in the current nature of public service provision in Bangladesh to make public service providers directly accountable at the local level. Further reduction in maternal mortality is possible in rural Bangladesh through vigorous campaigns against smoking, prevention of births to women with four or more children, the delay of births to primigravidas, prevention and treatment of anaemia, and promotion of full doses of tetanus vaccines for pregnant women.

Read more here.

The Stigma Matrix – Gender, Globalisation and the Agency of Pakistan’s Frontline Women

By Fauzia Husain

As developing states adopt neoliberal policies, more and more working-class women find themselves pulled into the public sphere. They are pressed into wage work by a privatizing and unstable job market. Likewise, they are pulled into public roles by gender mainstreaming policies that developing states must sign on to in order to receive transnational aid. Their inclusion into the political economy is very beneficial for society, but is it also beneficial for women? In The Stigma Matrix Fauzia Husain draws on the experiences of policewomen, lady health workers, and airline attendants, all frontline workers who help the Pakistani state, and its global allies, address, surveil, and discipline veiled women citizens. These women, she finds, confront a stigma matrix: a complex of local and global, historic, and contemporary factors that work together to complicate women’s integration into public life. The experiences of the three groups Husain examines reveal that inclusion requires more than quotas or special seats. This book advances critical feminist and sociological frameworks on stigma and agency showing that both concepts are made up of multiple layers of meaning, and are entangled with elite projects of hegemony.

Read more here.

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑