The COVID-19 pandemic has brought age-old global health issues to the forefront of public debates. Concretely, the devastation caused by the pandemic has shed light on the stark inequities that structure the global health apparatus. From an anthropological perspective, the field of global health is an area of research that links health to assemblages of complex and contingent global processes. The contribution of anthropology to global health has typically included analyses of health inequities that have significantly advanced the project of identifying the social determinants of health. Hence, the COVID-19 pandemic has constituted an unprecedented opportunity for anthropological insights to shape debates and practices around emerging topics and classic (but unresolved) health issues.
As a discipline grounded in empirical methods and with a body of theory built on concepts critical to understanding health and well-being (i.e. stigma, ethnicity, medicalisation, health-seeking behaviours), anthropology is uniquely positioned to advance progress in global health equity. Moreover, one of the key concerns of contemporary anthropological theory has been to grasp the relationship between the global and the local in an increasingly globalized world, advancing our understanding of how global processes unfold in specific contexts and are grounded in lived realities. In the aftermath of a global pandemic, anthropological work in and of global health has never been more urgent.
We invite papers that address the following broad themes:
- Misalignments between health priorities of local populations and those of the global health agenda
- How global inequities in access to, and distribution of, medicines/treatments/vaccines unfold in local contexts
- Critical analysis of emerging key concepts in global health discourse (eg. global health security)
- The role of local communities in handling public health problems, and/or their engagement in health emergencies
- Critical accounts from medical anthropology perspectives
- Methodological and ethical aspects of anthropological research in, and of, global health
