DV421      Half Unit
Critical Perspectives on Global Health and Development

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The course is concerned with health and international development in its social, cultural, historical, economic and political context. Students will learn to think critically about how global health policy and practice reproduce and/or change power relations - between states, communities and individuals. The course does this by exploring the history of global health, interrogating taken-for granted concepts and understanding how they have been socially constructed and suggesting alternative perspectives. Drawing on anthropological, sociological and other literature, it investigates how global health policies reproduce, change or are changed by values, morals, ethics and people’s identities and subjectivity. Themes that run through the course include: legacies of colonialism and imperialism; critiques of neoliberalism; and interrogating positivism in global health research. In depth case studies are drawn mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia and typically focus on specific diseases, health conditions or parts of the health system. Drawing on theories of power such as structural violence and governmentality, the course will enable students to question mainstream global health policy initiatives which might seek to promote equity and human rights, but may instead create new exclusions and marginalised populations. Arguments of global health activists pertaining to feminism, de-colonisation and transcultural psychiatry, for example, are also critically evaluated.

15 hours of seminars and 15 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Presentation

Essay

Students are expected to prepare at least one class presentation and submit one written assessment.

A detailed weekly reading list will be provided at the first lecture. The readings for this course are from journals and selected book chapters mainly, but not exclusively in the fields of anthropology and sociology. The readings often focus on country case studies. 

• Farmer, P., Kim, J.Y., Kleinman, A. and Basilico, M., 2013. Reimagining global health: an introduction. Univ of California Press.
• Biehl, J. and Petryna, A. eds., 2013. When people come first: critical studies in global health. Princeton University Press.
• Burgess, R.A.,2024. Rethinking global health: frameworks of power. Taylor & Francis.
• Abimbola, S., 2024, The Foreign Gaze: Essays on Global Health
• Packard RM., 2016. A history of global health: interventions into the lives of other peoples. JHU Press
• Adams, V., 2016. Metrics: What counts in global health. Duke University Press.
• Geissler, P.W., Rottenburg, R. and Zenker, J. eds., 2014. Rethinking biomedicine and governance in Africa: Contributions from anthropology (Vol. 15). transcript Verlag.
• Lock, M.M. and Nguyen, V.K., 2018. An anthropology of biomedicine. John Wiley & Sons
• Birn, A.E., Pillay, Y. and Holtz, T.H., 2017. Textbook of global health. Oxford University Press.

Essay (100%, 3000 words)

The summative assessment will consist of a 3,000-word essay, due at the start of Spring Term.