233041 SE STS perspectives on global health crises (2021W)

What defines a global health crisis? How is the ‘global’ in global health to be understood? How does ‘global health’ relate to, (re-)articulate and perhaps transform the power relations, value systems and political epistemologies that underpin socio-technical orders?

For STS scholars, global health crises present intriguing entry points to explore and analyze how socio-technical orders are being thought, acted upon and re-configured around the individual and collective bodies and populations in the context of globalization.

While, at the onset of the current pandemic, the slogan ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’ underscores a sense of globally shared health-related vulnerabilities, health crises play out differently in different settings and places. Moreover, ‘global health’ means different things in different contexts and its focus and remit is subject to ongoing contestation and problematization: On the one hand, global health has been defined as a field of research and practice that seeks to improve health - and achieve equity in health - for all people worldwide. On the other hand, critical scholars have underscored the power asymmetries between North and South, as well as the political economies and geographies of (non-)knowledge, (dis-)investment and exploitation that are re-enacted through global health governance. Signifying a break with the 20th century notion of international health, the emergence of ‘global health’ designates a novel (bio-)political reality in an era of globalization. The rising ‘global health complex’ is shaped by a new sense of shared vulnerability, the increasing wedding of health risks with national security threats (as exemplified in pandemic preparedness and anti-bioterror strategies) and an increasing role of new private actors such as private-sector (e.g. pharmaceutical corporations), philanthropic organizations (e.g. Gates Foundation) and public-private partnerships; as well as, more recently, the advent of Big Data (Google, Amazon, etc.) in global health.

Aims and methods:
In this seminar we will try to understand and critically analyze ‘global health crises’ and the different approaches and paradigms of global health governance that undergird them. Guided by STS conceptual sensibilities, we will seek to understand their specific forms of knowledge and expertise, leading values, and practices of power and intervention. In particular, we will seek to understand the relationships and entanglements between epistemic, economic and ethical discourses and practices that shape the making of health crises in the 21st century. Our guiding questions throughout the seminar include, among others:
How did global health emerge as a particular ‘thought style’, object of knowledge and field of practical intervention?
How is the 'science' of global health produced and which particular actors and institutions shape what we know (and don't know!) about health?
What is the role of public health organizations, medical research industries, and philanthropy in global health sciences & governance?
How did modern epidemiology shape the ways we think about disease, populations, publics and 'the global'?
How is global health shaped by market forces and economic imperatives in which ‘health’ is being measured as a financial asset, economic burden or opportunity for investment?
What are the norms and principles that guide global health governance?
What are the different 'paradigms' of global health (e.g. humanitarian biomedicine; global health security) and how are these co-produced by specific ways of knowing and ordering the world?
How are the pressing needs and challenges for global health in the 21st century framed - and what could be the role of STS to address and tackle them?