16-17 December, 2022
Berlin, Germany
Co-Sponsored by: German Foreign Academic Exchange, Free University of Berlin (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology), Charité University of Medicine of Berlin (Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy and Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research), Humboldt University Berlin (Institute of European Ethnology), University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Institute for European Studies, Center for Global Public Health and Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative).
Facilitated by: Hansjörg Dilger (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin); Ulrike Kluge (Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité University Medicine Berlin & Berlin Institute for Integration- and Migration Research, Humboldt Universität Berlin); Regina Römhild (Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt Universität Berlin); Seth M. Holmes (Medical Anthropology, Society and Environment, Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Center for Global Public Health, and Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, University of California Berkeley)
Participants from global health, medicine, social and cultural anthropology, and community organizations.
Evening: Public Panel Discussion at the Charité School of Medicine: “Confronting Racism, Colonialism and Migration in Global Health: Frameworks for the Future.” Speakers included:
- TINASHE GORONGA (Centre for Health Equity Zimbabwe - CHEZ; and EqualHealth Global Campaign Against Racism - CAR)
- SETH M. HOLMES (UC Berkeley - Berkeley Center for Social Medicine)
- MIREILLE NGOSSO (Hietzing hospital; Federal State Parliament, Vienna)
- DENIZ PETROVITY (Amaro Drom e.V., Berlin)
December 17:
Morning and Afternoon: Working discussions on de/coloniality, (post)migrancy, and racialization in relation to global health in light of the previous evening's panel presentation. Drafting of joint statement relating decolonization, migration and racism to the future of global health work.
Evening: Public Conversation with Kader Attia at SAVVY Community Center: "Repair, Art, De/Coloniality and the Future of Global Health"
Description:
Numerous institutions, programs, and actors in the field of Global Health have become involved in efforts of decolonization. The commitment to the topic has resulted in a steadily growing number of lecture series, summer schools, and publications that all signal the involved actors’ openness for a decolonial approach of their own and others’ work. It thus seems that decolonization as an underlying analytical and methodological framework has become an acknowledged part of contemporary understandings of Global Health.
At the same time, however, the longstanding impact of colonial power relations continues to shape the existing field of Global Health when it comes to the unequal distribution of resources between and within the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South.’ Furthermore, travel and visa regulations impeding transnational mobility and exchange as well as the dependencies and hierarchies that characterize inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration across these various settings expose the asymmetries of knowledge production in a postcolonial world.
Moreover, even current framings of a ‘decolonial’ or ‘postcolonial’ global health approach still do not sufficiently acknowledge the negative impact of global and national health regimes on migrants and refugees. The movements of migrant and refugee populations across borders and their presence in the global North and global South conflict with health systems that prioritize the provision of care for national citizens. Thus, additional exclusions and hierarchies of deservingness are produced and multiple racialized distinctions are perpetuated, testifying to an overall continuity of structural racism in the Global Health context. This includes, among others, hierarchies of language and dominant conceptualizations of health that maintain the separation and inequities of situated knowledges in this field.
The resulting global health sciences, interventions, and infrastructures produce inequities that are interconnected with the dynamics of flight and migration. Furthermore, colonial trajectories have shaped the epistemological foundations of Global Health and are inseparably entwined with institutional and structural racism in medicine and the provision of healthcare; they have a significant impact on unequal morbidity and mortality rates across and within populations both in the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’. Moreover, while health services and health research in the ‘Global South’ is still shaped by the import of knowledge and practices from abroad, medicine and healthcare in all parts of the world fall short of accepting that forced and regular migrants have long become an integral part of their societies and health services.
This workshop aims to formulate a conceptual framework for how the decolonization of Global Health research and interventions can be achieved in both research and practice by accounting for the dynamics of racialization and migration in existing healthcare practices and infrastructures. It brings together scholars from the social sciences, public and global health, with practitioners, activists and community members from different areas of engagement with health-related themes. Together, the group will reflect on the ways in which the decolonization of Global Health research and interventions can be achieved – and under which conditions such efforts are likely to remain only ‘lip service’ rather than paving the way for actual change in knowledge production, policy, practice and global health equity.
We will discuss how a decolonial approach in Global Health can (or has to) be related to social scientific discussions on postmigrant societies and racialization: Do these concepts offer new perspectives for confronting and overcoming long-standing divisions between the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ in the field of Global Health? How can they help place the embodiment and knowledge of colonial trajectories and (infra-)structures in individual people’s physical and mental suffering at the center of debates on decolonization? How can all these concepts help us embrace a Global health approach that shifts the focus on including situated understandings of health, wellbeing, and healing in the provision of healthcare? The goal is an approach that aims for a mode of contextualized knowledge production that integrates situatedness in regard to people, space and time and takes into account individual, group specific, nation and globalization related transformations, such as digitalization, climate change and world-wide crisis. Based on these critical reflections in the field of global health, we aim to contribute to the generally acute process of decolonizing contemporary understandings of society and conviviality.
Funded by the DAAD - German Foreign Academic Exchange
