Law – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Arpitha Kodiveri

The nations of the Global North are responding to the climate change emergency with emissions trading schemes and alternative sources of energy. Meanwhile, nations of the Global South, still emerging from historical exploitation under colonialism, face decisions about natural resource use that are, for traditional owners and inhabitants of resource – rich lands, often a matter of life or death.

This book is the culmination of seven years immersed in the legal struggles of diverse forest-dwelling communities in India. Inspired by these social movements, Kodiveri tell the stories of how adivasi communities are using and shaping the law through clever legal interpretation and activism. The law Kodiveri shows is expanded, reframed and rendered malleable by forest-dwelling indigenous communities to be inclusive of their visions of justice, all while other laws seek to criminalize and erase their rights to land and waters.

Read the book here.

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.

Tag: Law

Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests