School of Social and Political Science

Description

EdCMA Lunchtime Brown Bag Seminar with global health historian Marissa Mika 

Precedented Times: Thinking with African Health Histories After the Chainsaw Comes for Global Health 

Over the past two decades, organizations such as the Gates Foundation, the Emerson Collective, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative, funding conglomerates such as the Global Fund, NGOs such as Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders, and US driven foreign aid initiatives such as PEPFAR made major investments in creating a Global Health infrastructure that dramatically reshaped the landscape of healthcare and drug treatment access in the Global South. With the dismantling of USAID and the withdrawal of support for continued PEPFAR funding in 2025, it seems that this era of "Global Health" is over. It is estimated that millions of lives now hang in the balance of this abrupt withdrawal of funding and dramatic transformations of the research-humanitarian complex that are underway in the US.   

African physicians, research scientists, health workers, and NGO directors have long called for “decolonizing” global health and leveraged powerful and necessary critiques about the power structures of the Global Health industry. It now seems that the decolonization of global health is here, whether or not anyone was actually prepared for this pull out and abdication of responsibility or, as Elon Musk would put it, the “chainsaw for bureaucracy.”  

These are precedented times. This is certainly not the first time African physician-researchers, health care workers, and patients are finding themselves tasked with keeping things going after international collaborations end and funding evaporates, nor will it be the last. 

This talk is part of a new book project, Decolonizing Global Health: How Hard Can It Be? It aims to situate the contemporary moment within the broader historical context of health, healing, and the decolonization and Africanization of medicine in Africa. I draw upon lessons from the Uganda Cancer Institute during Idi Amin, Fanon's discussions of Medicine and Colonialism, the early days of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, and my own experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer and director of the Medical Humanities program at the University of Global Health Equity. My aim is to offer a way to move forward and think creatively about the possibilities for rethinking global health equity in this time of profound crisis.

Author Bio

Dr. Marissa Mika is an independent scholar and developmental editor with two decades of experience considering the mileage between hunger and wealth in global health. She is the author of Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda, which was a finalist for both the ASA Best Book Prize and the Bethwell A. Ogot Award for Best Book in East African Studies in 2022. Most recently, she was a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University. In 2020, Dr. Mika was the founding director of the medical humanities program at the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda. Between 2016 and 2018, she held a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship on Chronic Disease in Africa at University College London. Trained as a historian and anthropologist of medicine, science, and technology in Africa, she has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in the History and Sociology of Science and a MHS in International Health from Johns Hopkins.