Duke Decolonizing Global Health | Global Health Futures

The field of global health is inherently interdisciplinary, multisectoral, and international. Teams that convene to address the world’s most pressing global health issues are typically built out of “Global South-Global North” collaborations. These collaborations, however, were and continue to be established in unequal power dynamics. The goal of this panel is to explore how these dynamics have developed by exploring different case studies and perspectives from global health practitioners around the world.

Global Health Histories Seminar 141: Global Health Futures

Moderator: Laura Mkumba - MSc Candidate in Global Health at Duke University

Panelists:
Eugene T. Richardson, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Attending Physician in the Division of Infectious Disease at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He received his MD from Cornell University Medical College and his PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. Dr. Richardson previously served as the clinical lead for Partners In Health’s Ebola response in Kono District, Sierra Leone, where he continues to conduct research on the social epidemiology of Ebola virus disease. He also worked as a clinical case management consultant for the WHO’s Ebola riposte in Beni, Democratic Republic of the Congo. His overall focus is on biosocial approaches to epidemic disease prevention, containment, and treatment in sub-Saharan Africa. As part of this effort, he is chair of the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice

Sanjoy Bhattacharya, PhD is a Professor of History of Medicine, Director of the Centre for Global Health Histories, Head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Global Health Histories and Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator in the Medical Humanities at the University of York, UK. His work deals with the history and international relations of health across South Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries, and he is also involved qualitative work of relevance of national and global policy. Sanjoy is currently completing work on two books: one reassesses the formation of the WHO and the call for Primary Health Care, while the other studies the contributions of national governance in the unfolding and expansion of smallpox eradication programmes across the South Asian sub-continent.
Deborah Jenson, PhD is a Professor of Romance Studies (French) and Global Health at Duke University. Dr. Jenson founded and co-directs the Health Humanities Lab. She is also a co-convener of the DIBS Neurohumanities Research Group. Her current global health work focuses on the invention of ethnopsychiatry in Haiti in relation to critique of European neuroscience and emerging mental health fields. Previous global health work has addressed the history of cholera in the Caribbean, and post-traumatic stress in Caribbean colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Allysha C. Maragh-Bass, PhD is a mixed-methods Scientist in Behavioral, Epidemiological, and Clinical Sciences at FHI 360. She completed her PhD at Johns Hopkins University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She was a 2018 Domestic Scholar with the HIV Prevention Trials Network and is a 2019 Ward Cates Emerging Scientific Leader. She has worked in health care settings from primary care to surgery and across the minority health spectrum. Dr. Maragh-Bass is also a highly experienced educator who, in addition to her role at FHI 360, is adjunct at the George Washington Milken Institute School of Public Health.

Seye Abimbola, MD, PhD is the Editor in Chief of BMJ Global Health and Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. Dr. Abimbola is a health systems researcher. He has worked and studied in Nigeria where he completed his medical training at Obafemi Awolowo University; in Australia where completed a PhD in health systems research at the University of Sydney; and in the United Kingdom where he was a Sidney Sax Overseas Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford. From 2009-10, Seye Abimbola was a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar from Nigeria to Australia, and from 2010-13 he was a research fellow at the National Primary Health Care Development Agency in Nigeria. Dr. Abimbola studies community engagement in governance, decentralised governance and the role of governance in the adoption and scale up of innovations.