Despite its many definitions, Global Health has historically been characterised by international/regional and local travelling to do ‘public health work’. Throughout its (colonial and post-colonial) history, the discipline has been associated with mobility of Westerners to low-resource settings to deliver interventions that were moralised as ‘duty of care’ and informed by high income countries’ epistemologies. The arrival of COVID-19, against the backdrop of inequality politics and institutional racism, unsettled the discipline’s inherent power of framing local interventions in research, education, humanitarian work etc. While the killing of George Floyd resulted in popular consciousness which opened spaces for critical reflections on the intersections of power, racism, coloniality and gender, the pandemic exposed historically engrained health inequalities and raised epistemological questions about the curricula, global health research and practices.
As an air-borne respiratory disease, COVID-19 prevention methods ‘immobilise’ students, educators, researchers, health care and humanitarian workers etc. through physical distancing, travel restrictions, and traveller quarantine. Some of the dominant features of global health practices now sit in the balance. How has COVID-19 created spaces for interrogating the meanings, practices and power of global heath and its accomplice, international aid?
The aim of this Research Topic is to interrogate the ‘disruptions’ brought by the COVID-19 pandemic to global health practices including education, research and humanitarian work. There is a sense that the deep, immersive engagement which is construed as one of the essences of global health practices including ethnographic fieldwork, education and capacity building, and humanitarian work, may be compromised due to risks posed by the pandemic, and responses to those risks. We are interested in exploring what the immobilisation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic will mean for the practice and epistemologies of "global health". The omnipresence of technologies to replace some of the human interactions also brings into question the meaning of ‘mobilities’, risks and identities in the COVID-19 era. This Research Topic documents the experiences of global health practitioners whose work was impacted by the pandemic as they negotiated new meanings, spaces, identities, and risks.
The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic affecting most aspects of our lives, has created opportunities for several conversations in global health. We are looking at manuscripts that bring these diverse experiences under the following broad themes: education, humanitarian work, research, technologies, risk management and identities and place. The manuscripts can be reviews, research papers, case studies, commentaries, and reflective pieces. How has COVID-19 disrupted the itineraries of global health practitioners, including students and educators, who are caught up in the pandemic storm? Whilst travel restrictions created an imagined hegemonic ‘new’ normal through home-schooling and home-working, this has not been universal as some frontline workers had to be physically present in health care settings. What has been their experiences? Again, as an example, ethnographic fieldwork that had been planned or underway when COVID-19 arrived, were disrupted as borders closed and restrictions imposed. We would like to hear from authors as they reflect on their experiences of negotiating COVID-19 risks and their perceived identities as global health professionals and researchers, educators. As technologies offer a way of circumventing close contact in global health practices, new questions about the meanings and experiences of ‘presence’ in global health praxis arise. We also welcome manuscripts from global health educators, following the unsettling of education practices and curriculums influenced by western and colonial epistemologies. How have educators decolonised the curriculum? What are students’ own understanding of a colonised global health curriculum?
Despite its many definitions, Global Health has historically been characterised by international/regional and local travelling to do ‘public health work’. Throughout its (colonial and post-colonial) history, the discipline has been associated with mobility of Westerners to low-resource settings to deliver interventions that were moralised as ‘duty of care’ and informed by high income countries’ epistemologies. The arrival of COVID-19, against the backdrop of inequality politics and institutional racism, unsettled the discipline’s inherent power of framing local interventions in research, education, humanitarian work etc. While the killing of George Floyd resulted in popular consciousness which opened spaces for critical reflections on the intersections of power, racism, coloniality and gender, the pandemic exposed historically engrained health inequalities and raised epistemological questions about the curricula, global health research and practices.
As an air-borne respiratory disease, COVID-19 prevention methods ‘immobilise’ students, educators, researchers, health care and humanitarian workers etc. through physical distancing, travel restrictions, and traveller quarantine. Some of the dominant features of global health practices now sit in the balance. How has COVID-19 created spaces for interrogating the meanings, practices and power of global heath and its accomplice, international aid?
The aim of this Research Topic is to interrogate the ‘disruptions’ brought by the COVID-19 pandemic to global health practices including education, research and humanitarian work. There is a sense that the deep, immersive engagement which is construed as one of the essences of global health practices including ethnographic fieldwork, education and capacity building, and humanitarian work, may be compromised due to risks posed by the pandemic, and responses to those risks. We are interested in exploring what the immobilisation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic will mean for the practice and epistemologies of "global health". The omnipresence of technologies to replace some of the human interactions also brings into question the meaning of ‘mobilities’, risks and identities in the COVID-19 era. This Research Topic documents the experiences of global health practitioners whose work was impacted by the pandemic as they negotiated new meanings, spaces, identities, and risks.
The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic affecting most aspects of our lives, has created opportunities for several conversations in global health. We are looking at manuscripts that bring these diverse experiences under the following broad themes: education, humanitarian work, research, technologies, risk management and identities and place. The manuscripts can be reviews, research papers, case studies, commentaries, and reflective pieces. How has COVID-19 disrupted the itineraries of global health practitioners, including students and educators, who are caught up in the pandemic storm? Whilst travel restrictions created an imagined hegemonic ‘new’ normal through home-schooling and home-working, this has not been universal as some frontline workers had to be physically present in health care settings. What has been their experiences? Again, as an example, ethnographic fieldwork that had been planned or underway when COVID-19 arrived, were disrupted as borders closed and restrictions imposed. We would like to hear from authors as they reflect on their experiences of negotiating COVID-19 risks and their perceived identities as global health professionals and researchers, educators. As technologies offer a way of circumventing close contact in global health practices, new questions about the meanings and experiences of ‘presence’ in global health praxis arise. We also welcome manuscripts from global health educators, following the unsettling of education practices and curriculums influenced by western and colonial epistemologies. How have educators decolonised the curriculum? What are students’ own understanding of a colonised global health curriculum?
