Reimagining Global Health
June 9-13, 2025
Course Overview
Since colonial times, global health has always been more about charity, goodwill, and saviorism, rather than justice, rights, and equity. Without education and reflection, it is easy to perpetuate this saviorism model of global health. To counter this, we need to reimagine a better model, one that is rooted in justice, equity, human rights, and self-determination. As we deal with massive, transnational challenges that threaten our very existence (e.g., widening economic inequities, conflicts, pandemics, and climate change), our ability to act as global citizens, forge genuine partnerships and demonstrate authentic solidarity and allyship may well determine our shared future.
Course Description
This interactive course aims to give students the opportunity to broaden their understanding and knowledge of global health issues, including core topics such as the colonial history of global health, power asymmetries in global health, privilege, racism & allyship, global health governance, social determinants of health, and health inequities. Given the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, the course will use pandemics and climate crisis, two existential threats, to illustrate the challenges and opportunities inherent in global health work. Throughout the course, the need to ‘decolonize global health’, as well as to practice authentic allyship will be highlighted. The course will help students to avoid a white saviorism approach to global health. The course will also encourage students to consider the glocal model – addressing health disparities wherever they occur. The course consists of lectures (including guest lectures from experts around the world), discussions and inspiring videos/films or podcasts. As explained by Dr. Pai and several other global health teachers (BMJ Global Health 2021), the course will attempt to:
- Use COVID-19 & climate crisis as a teachable moment, and use them to focus on equity and human rights as a central theme in global health.
- Cover the importance of understanding racism and white supremacy in global health, and include content on privilege, anti-oppression, anti-racism and allyship.
- Include content on coloniality in global health and the persistent power asymmetries that affect every aspect of global health (e.g. inequity in COVID-19 vaccine access).
- Center the course on Black, Indigenous and people of colour speakers, especially experts from the Global South, Indigenous scholars, and individuals with lived experience.
- Teach students to avoid a white saviorism approach to global health and to see and address health inequities wherever they occur, not just in low-income countries.
Day 1 – June 9, 2025
- Reimagining global health (by Madhukar Pai) [Slides]
- White saviorism in international development (by Themrise Khan)
- Power in global health (by Rochelle Burgess) [Slides]
- Reimagining reproductive justice (by Himani Bhakuni) [Slides]
- Changing global health and soft money politics in the time of Trump (by Daniel Krugman) [Slides]
- The foreign gaze (by Seye Abimbola)
- Reimagining global health journals: editors as allies (by Julia Robinson & Catherine Kyobutungi) [Slides]
- How to… do decolonial research (by Thirusha Naidu) [Slides]
- Global NCDs as a social justice issue (by Christine Ngaruiya) [Slides]
- Applying the coin of privilege to global health (by Stephanie Nixon)
- Reimagining global mental health (by Vikram Patel) [Slides]
- Reimagining access to medicines: the global fight for health equity (by Fatima Hassan) [Slides]
- Advancing gender equality through trust-based feminist philanthropy (by Samuel Oji Oti) [Slides]
- ‘Decolonising global health’: rejecting the single story (by Maju Brunette) [Slides]
- Early findings from the Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination and Global Health (by Ngozi Erondu) [Slides]
- Reimagining global health ethics: a view from the Global South (by Anant Bhan) [Slides]
- Global health mentorship: challenges and opportunities for equitable partnership (by Luchuo Engelbert Bain) [Slides]
- Anti-blackness and global health (by Lioba Hirsch) [Slides]
- Disability justice in global health: let’s not forget to dismantle ableism (by Ananya Banerjee) [Slides]
- Reimagining implementation science in the Global South (by Grace Umutesi) [Slides]
- From barrier to enabler: transforming language for global health collaboration (by Yap Boum II) [Slides]
- The climate emergency and our planetary health: decolonization, justice, and peace (by Renzo Guinto) [Slides]
- Reimagining global health education (by Shashika Bandara) [Slides]
- Reimagining global health partnerships (by Anna Stewart Ibarra) [Slides]
- The courage to be free: cultivating a decolonial imagination (by Ijeoma Nnodim Opara)
Reading list