Critical Global Health

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book brings together an international group that includes anthropologists, historians, and an epidemiologist and human-rights scholar to produce an ethnographic critique of the contemporary global health enterprise. These contributors are engaged in both empirical and theoretical investigations of global health-related initiatives and epistemologies, and are concerned with the actual impacts of these initiatives on care, health systems, and governance. The book emphasizes ethnography as a crucial methodological tool for achieving better comprehension of health services at all levels of analysis and advocates anthropological case studies and cross-cultural analysis as foundational to a much-needed critical global health perspective. The book offers innovative ways of thinking about older debates in light of emerging realities, and it sets a new agenda for research in global health, one aimed at a more comprehensive framework for understanding the human, technical, and political issues involved.

Community health workers and social change:

“…Ethnography can serve as a sort of early warning system for the field of global public health, encouraging leaders to seize opportunities to reimagine the way the global health industry works, specifically the way it values local people and their power, skills, and knowledge (Biehl and Petryna ; Farmer et al ). Current and future research may reveal that CHWs in various parts of the globe, now and in the near future, are making movements toward organizing their own ranks, forging cross‐border and transnational links with other CHWs and social activists, and seeking the power and mechanisms to hold institutions more accountable.…”

The ‘empty choice’: A sociological examination of choosing medical research participation in resource-limited Sub-Saharan Africa

“…These committees might stress the need for local language translation or other methodological and technical issues but they are expected to ‘rubber stamp’ research approved in the Global North, not assess the overall contribution of particular studies to strengthening local structural issues (Kass et al, 2007; Moran et al, 2009; Peterson, 2014). Yet, there are very few fora where the impact of these issues on research participation can be addressed holistically and in the absence of an open discussion they can be argued not to exist (Biehl and Petryna, 2013). In this way, as argued by Du Gay (2000), Northern institutions and funders can strategically distance themselves from the responsibilities involved in addressing local structural concerns by either understating the effects and extent of structural factors or accepting that there are structural concerns but emphasising choice at the level of government and individual research participants to host research and accept its terms and conditions.…”

Power, potential, and pitfalls in global health academic partnerships: review and reflections on an approach in Nepal

“…Possible is a non-profit healthcare provider that has pioneered an approach with the MoH, through which the government provides facilities, staff, supplies, and co-financing, and Possible assumes management authority and is held accountable for direct healthcare delivery within government infrastructure. The partnership is deeply sensitive to the contentious nature of PPPs in the arena of global healthcare delivery [58,59], and the shared goal is to both meet public sector delivery gaps in rural areas and provide a platform for public sector innovation. Possible targets an annual per capita price point of $US25, based upon the current levels of public sector financing in Nepal.…”