Teaching fellow for Dr. Jesse Bump

Widening inequality, enduring patterns of extraction, persistent power imbalances, and ongoing marginalization stand in stark opposition with the goals of global health and standard narratives of its triumphs. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought additional awareness to racial, economic, and other inequalities within and between societies, and also has raised questions about why so much unfairness endures. This course engages and interrogates colonialism and its sequelae as major causes of current problems, aiming to define and advance a decolonization agenda. It seeks to address central weaknesses in global health’s decolonization movement, particularly the limited engagement with historical scholarship and decolonization theory, which are necessary to understand the mechanisms of colonialism, and to contest its ongoing influence in global health. The course focuses mainly on the 19th and 20th centuries, placing particular emphasis on the role of public health and medicine in colonial and imperial contexts to analyze how these policy areas were shaped to serve metropolitan material and intellectual goals. Comparative case analyses will be used to illuminate the difference between decision making on health policies in colonial and metropolitan contexts, and to connect patterns of the past with intellectual and institutional features of global health.