The framing of health as a global issue over the last three decades has carved out an intellectual, economic and political space that differs from that of the post-war international public health field. This older system was characterised by disease eradication programs and by the dominance of nation states and the organisations of the United Nations. The actors, intervention targets and tools of contemporary global health contrast with previous international health efforts.

Argument

The framing of health as a global issue over the last three decades has carved out an intellectual, economic and political space that differs from that of the post-war international public health field. This older system was characterised by disease eradication programs and by the dominance of nation states and the organisations of the United Nations. The actors, intervention targets and tools of contemporary global health contrast with previous international health efforts. The construction of markets for medical goods takes a central place in this new era, as does regulation by civil society actors. Global health can also be characterized by co-morbidities between chronic and infectious diseases, the stress on therapeutic intervention, risk management, health as an instrument of 'community' development and the deployment of new modes of surveillance and epidemiological prediction. This emerging field takes on a radically different appearance when examined at the level of its infrastructures (such as the WHO, the World Bank or the Gates Foundation) or at the level of the knowledges and anticipatory practices generated by its practices and local instantiations.

This seminar will combine historical, sociological and anthropological approaches to examine this globalized space and the assemblages that constitute it: new actors, targets and tools such as public- private partnerships, foundations, local communities, cancers, non- communicable diseases, risk prevention, monitoring and evaluation, etc. Particular attention will be given to the infrastructures and the contemporary dynamics of knowledge production, insurance techniques and diagnostic interventions, therapeutic 'innovations' in their diverse geographies, including Africa, Asia or Latin America. These often differ widely from transfer schemes between the global north and the global south that insist on technological dependency. The seminar will examine the myriad local forms that global health takes in everyday practices from epidemiological forecasting, to research, care, policy-making and the possible futures they anticipate.

Program

14th October 2014

Room 2, 2-5 p.m.

• Kristin Peterson (University of California Irvine), Speculative Markets. Drug circuits and derivative life in Nigeria.

13th November 2014

Room 318, 2-5 p.m.

• Waltraud Ernst (Oxford Brookes), Global Connections, Plural Concepts and Standardised Classifications. The cases of melancholia, circular insanity and depression in colonial South Asia, c. 1925-1940

9th December 2014

Room 015, 2-5 p.m.

• Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Michigan / Fellow of the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies), Nervousness and Therapeutic Insurgency in a Colonial Situation

13th January 2015

Room 318, 2-5 p.m.

• Judith Farquhar (University of Chicago), Institution and the Wild: Salvaging and Sorting Minority Medicines in China (Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai)

10th février 2015

Room 318, 2-5 p.m.

• Stacey Langwick (Cornell University), Partial Publics: The Political Promise of Contemporary Traditional Medicine in Africa.

14th April 2015

Room 318, 2-5 p.m.

• Projit B. Mukharji (University of Pennsylvania), Tropical Blood: Race and Tropical Medicine in Interwar India.

12th May 2015

Room 318, 2-5 p.m.

• Elisabeth Hsu (University of Oxford). From social lives to interactive playing fields: the "pharmaceutical" Artemisinin and the "herbal" Artemisia annua.

9th June 2015

Room 318, 2-5 p.m.

Andrew Lakoff (University of Southern California). Global Health in a Time of Emergency.

Organizors

• Claire Beaudevin (CNRS-Cermes3),
• Jean-Paul Gaudillière (Inserm- Cermes3),
• Frédéric Keck (CNRS-LAS/Musée du Quai Branly),
• Guillaume Lachenal (Université Paris Diderot-IUF),
• Céline Lefève (Université Paris Diderot - Centre Georges Canguilhem),
• Vinh-Kim Nguyen (Collège d'études mondiales),
• Laurent Pordié (CNRS- Cermes3),
• Émilia Sanabria (Inserm-École Normale Supérieure de Lyon).

This lecture series is supported by the ERC project « From International Public Health to Global Health » (CERMES3, Paris & University of Oslo) and the chair for Anthropology and Global Health (Collège d’Etudes Mondiales, FMSH, Paris).