The role of language in maintaining asymmetries of power in global public health and biomedicine has become a central part of the broader movement to "decolonize Global Health." While considering how language engenders inequalities in Global Health, hinders interventions, and inhibits medical care, this article contends that colonially derived theorizations of what language is undergirding top-down health communication efforts labeled as "decolonial" can thwart efforts to make biomedical care and public health clearer in postcolonies. We do this through outlining predicaments found in a linguistic anthropological exploration of cancer terminology in Coastal Tanzania.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper reports and examines the results of qualitative research on the use of local cancer terminology in urban Bagamoyo, Tanzania. Following recent calls to unify evidence and dignity-based practices in global health, this research locates local medical sociolinguistics as a key place of entry into creating epistemologically autonomous public health practices. We used semistructured ethnographic interviews to reveal both the contextual and broader patterns related to use of local cancer terminologies among residents of Dunda Ward in urban Bagamoyo.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLOS Glob Public Health
June 2023
Global Health is experiencing a moment of reckoning over the field's legacy and current structuring in a world facing multiple, intersecting challenges to health. While "decolonization" has emerged as the dominant frame to imagine change in the field, what the concept refers to and entails has become increasingly unclear. Despite warnings, the concept is now being used by elite Global North institutions and organization to imagine their reformation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInspired by the 2021 BMJ Global Health Editorial by Atkins on global health (GH) teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of GH students and recent graduates from around the world convened to discuss our experiences in GH education during multiple global crises. Through weekly meetings over the course of several months, we reflected on the impact the COVID-19 pandemic and broader systemic inequities and injustices in GH education and practice have had on us over the past 2 years. Despite our geographical and disciplinary diversity, our collective experience suggests that while the pandemic provided an opportunity for changing GH education, that opportunity was not seized by most of our institutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The debate over the impact of vertical programmes, including mass vaccination, on health systems is long-standing and often polarised. Studies have assessed the effects of a given vertical health programme on a health system separatelyfrom the goals of the vertical programme itself. Further, these health system effects are often categorised as either positive or negative.
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