Ethics – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Yixue Yang and Sharrona Pearl

This seminar is part of the centre for History in Public Health seminar series: Historical perspectives on ethics, morals, and values in public health. It examines the cultural and political contexts shaping historical public health interventions.

Yang explores the Protecting Students’ Eyesight Campaign in later Mao-era People’s Republic of China -1960-1976), highlighting how health guidelines transformed students’ personal habits and how the instrumentalization of youth was coated in the rhetoric of protection. Pearl discusses the history of masking and its tensions in the US, from the 19th century to Covid, emphasising the dynamics around concealing and revealing, protecting and dividing. Using a broad historical lens, she explores the history of masking, exploring various sites and domains of practice to show its consistent use as a means of protection and division.

Read more and watch the seminar here.

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.

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:

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

Reas more and watch seminar here.

By Sheeva Sabati

This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowing” in which the racial colonial entanglements of academic research and institutions are obscured. She examines the origin stories situating Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as a response to cases of exceptional violence, most notably the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, within an otherwise neutral history of research. She then considers how the 2018 revisions to the Common Rule extend “colonial unknowing” by decontextualizing the forms of risk involved in social and behavioral research. She situates these complicities as necessary starting points toward anticolonial research ethics of “answerability.”

Tag: Ethics

Masks and myopia – politics and protection in public health campaigns

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

West African views of ethics and fairness in healthcare

Upholding “Colonial Unknowing” Through the IRB: Reframing Institutional Research Ethics