United States – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Laura Briggs

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, the US’ current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where Americans face economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction – stories of Black “welfare queens” and Latina “breeding machines”- were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families. With decreasing wages, rising McJobs, and no resources for family care, American households have grown ever more precarious over the past forty years in sharply race-and class-stratified ways. This crisis, argues Briggs, fuels all others – from immigration to gay marriage, anti-feminism to the rise of the Tea Party.

Read the book here.

By Keith Wailoo

Examining one hundred years in the public campaign against cancer, this path-breaking study of scientific, medical, and epidemiological writings and of cinematic and literary representations of disease, reveals how experts and the lay public saw cancer’s demographic shifts – from a stereotypical white female disease to equal opportunity killer — as a message about women, men, race and the changing color line.

Read the book here.

By Ariel Hart and Michael Lambert

Photo: Francisco Venâncio

This seminar examined the values of public health work targeting maternal and child welfare in the 20th century. Hart interrogated the social, political, and radical implications of new mid-century US public health surveillance programmes, looking at Black pregancy-related mortality and public health surveillance. Lambert considered the role of UK Medical Officers of Health in perpetrating reproductive injustice, highlighting the role of Medical Officers of Health in mid 20th century Britain.

Tag: United States

How Cancer Crossed the Color Line

Reproductive injustice in mid-20th century Britain and America