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Rethinking Global Health
This book reflects and analyses the working of power in the field of global health– and what this goes on to produce. In so doing, Rethinking Global Health asks the pivotal questions of, ‘who is global health for’ and ‘what is it that limits our ability to build responses that meet people where they are?’ Covering a wide range of topics from global mental health to Ebola, this book combines power analyses with interviews and personal reflections spanning the author’s decade-long career in global health. It interrogates how the search for global solutions can often end up far from where we anticipated. It also introduces readers to different frameworks for power analyses in the field, including an adaptation of the ‘matrix of domination’ for global health practice. Through this work, Dr Burgess develops a new model of Transformative Global Health, a framework that calls researchers and practitioners to adopt new orienting principles, placing community interests and voices at the heart of global health planning and solutions at all times. This book will be beneficial to students and academics working in the global and public health landscape. It will also hold appeal to activists, practitioners and individuals invested in the discipline and in health equity around the world. The Open Access version of this book, available at , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.
140 pages, Paperback
Published September 29, 2023
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November 11, 2024
Central to our training as Master of Public Health students in the University of Leeds is Dahlgren and Whitehead's framework for determinants of health, which imagines health as being impacted by concentric spheres of influence: a person's biology, lifestyle, community, and working and living conditions emanating from the center in concentric circles, like ripples created by a pebble dropped into a pond. The outermost ripple ("general socio-economic, cultural, and environmental conditions") however, has always struck me as vague, as if Dahlgren and Whitehead put it there as a wastebasket for health influences that defy classification.
Frameworks of Power sheds light on this vagueness. "Too often in global health," Burgess writes, "we overlook power affecting people's lives because we lack the frameworks that would enable us to see it; because power, in its many forms, works to obscure it." Burgess devotes the first part of her book to giving the reader a vocabulary for power. A example: the concept of "epistemic violence," which favors some forms of knowledge to the exclusion of others. A particularly vivid example is her critique of the 2014 Lancet Commission's series of studies on violence against women, which did not have a single paper on qualitative research asking affected women about what they think will actually help their case.
The second part of the book identifies approaches to addressing inequalities in power in global health. Burgess, for instance, gives a riveting account of Track 2 of the UN's new approach to cholera in Haiti, which provided funding for community initiatives, instead of imposing interventions on them.
In this book, Dr. Burgess has given me a career's worth of points to ponder as I embark on my own career in global health, and as I evaluate my own shortcomings as a public health practitioner. She has also given me a lifetime's worth of reading material on global health. "This book is littered with the words of people who have lived and died with a vision for changing the world," she writes. I cannot wait to sink my teeth into the writings of global health giants on whose shoulders Burgess stood: Thomas Sankara, Sunny Singh, Paul Farmer, Paulo Freire, and dozens of others.
Even so, this book is not perfect. It contains many typographical errors that trip up the reader. Then again, Dr. Burgess has graciously given the gift of this book to the world for free. You can read it at no cost on Google Play books. I highly recommend it to anyone who want their work to truly reflect the ideal of "nothing about us without us."
Frameworks of Power sheds light on this vagueness. "Too often in global health," Burgess writes, "we overlook power affecting people's lives because we lack the frameworks that would enable us to see it; because power, in its many forms, works to obscure it." Burgess devotes the first part of her book to giving the reader a vocabulary for power. A example: the concept of "epistemic violence," which favors some forms of knowledge to the exclusion of others. A particularly vivid example is her critique of the 2014 Lancet Commission's series of studies on violence against women, which did not have a single paper on qualitative research asking affected women about what they think will actually help their case.
The second part of the book identifies approaches to addressing inequalities in power in global health. Burgess, for instance, gives a riveting account of Track 2 of the UN's new approach to cholera in Haiti, which provided funding for community initiatives, instead of imposing interventions on them.
In this book, Dr. Burgess has given me a career's worth of points to ponder as I embark on my own career in global health, and as I evaluate my own shortcomings as a public health practitioner. She has also given me a lifetime's worth of reading material on global health. "This book is littered with the words of people who have lived and died with a vision for changing the world," she writes. I cannot wait to sink my teeth into the writings of global health giants on whose shoulders Burgess stood: Thomas Sankara, Sunny Singh, Paul Farmer, Paulo Freire, and dozens of others.
Even so, this book is not perfect. It contains many typographical errors that trip up the reader. Then again, Dr. Burgess has graciously given the gift of this book to the world for free. You can read it at no cost on Google Play books. I highly recommend it to anyone who want their work to truly reflect the ideal of "nothing about us without us."
Displaying 1 of 1 review