[Syllabus] Global Health in Crisis: On the (im)possibility of decolonizing global health

[The intention is to update this syllabus at least once a year with new readings, as well as continue to rework the layout and the progression of readings as I test out the syllabus. This constitutes the first version uploaded in May 2025.] Global health has been referred to (positively) as an empty signifier capable of bringing together a variety of actors, and just as many projects, with the (general) goal of improving population health. Although this may initially seem a desirable formulation, holding global health as an empty signifier also suggests that there are no strict approaches to evaluating the impact of global health projects; judging the theoretical, political, and personal interests, presuppositions or expectations that guide global health work beyond the desire to improve, to some degree, the health of a given population; or establishing widely agreed upon patterns of continuity and discontinuity between global health and its predecessors, like colonial tropical medicine. Using the notion of empty signifier as a starting point, this course will explore how the “emptiness” of global health either points to an existing crisis within global health, suggesting the possibility of reaching a new point of concerted action and organization towards something different, or whether global health is always already in crisis, suggesting that incomplete agreements within global health only seem incomplete because of accepted, yet unacknowledged, assumptions (e.g., what should constitute health or justice in health or the subject/object of health interventions). Under the latter, crisis also presents itself as a challenge for practitioners to either continue working under the paradigms offered by global health or finding different ways of thinking about the wellbeing of groups in an interconnected world. In other words, this course addresses a current push towards the decolonization of global health (a moment of crisis) and interrogates whether decolonizing global health is possible. Through select readings, we will address the constitution of global health as a historical phenomenon, explore some of the philosophical traditions that inform different approaches to population health, and address the way anthropologists have engaged with global health as practice, discipline, moral and ethical engagement, and a site of contested power relations.