The Global Health Politics Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with American University anthropologist Thurka Sangaramoorthy to discuss her work on immigration and health. They talk about her work with Haitian immigrants in South Florida that was the subject of her first book; her work at the CDC and book on rapid ethnographic assessments; her new book - Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America on how immigrants navigate healthcare challenges in rural Maryland; the field of anthropology; and her recent experience working as Refugee Coordinator for the State Department's response in Sudan and South Sudan.  

Send us Fan Mail

In this long-awaited episode, originally recorded in Fall 2022, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. James Pfeiffer, Professor of Global Health and Anthropology at University of Washington. They talk about global health work in Mozambique; World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs; debt and austerity and their impact on development; and the movement to decolonize global health.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, I sit down with UC-Berkeley Sociologist Ann Swidler to learn from her more than two decades of experience studying the aid industry, global health, culture, and institutions in Malawi amid the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, I sit down with UC-Riverside Political Scientist Kim Yi Dionne to talk about pandemic response in Africa, the discipline of political science, and her engagement with Malawi.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with Northwestern University anthropologist Adia Benton. They talk about her book, HIV Exceptionalism, her recent work on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the militarization of public health, and efforts to decolonize global health.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, I sit down with Tim Schwab, a freelance investigative journalist, whose new book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of a Good Billionaire, critically examines the profound influence of one of global health's biggest players, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, I sit down with Alexandre (Sasha) White, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, who is jointly affiliated with the School of Medicine and Department of the History of Medicine. We discuss his new book, Epidemic Orientalism: Race, Capital, and the Governance of Infectious Disease, and broader thoughts about the field of global health. 

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with Themrise Khan, a Pakistan-based development professional. They talk about Khan and her colleague's Kanakulya Dickson and Maike Sondarjee's groundbreaking new edited volume, White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices, and Lived Experiences, and its impact on the field of global health and international development. 

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, we have a conversation with Dr. Eduardo Gómez, Professor in the Department of Community and Population Health and Director of the Institute of Health Policy and Politics at Lehigh University. A political scientist by training, Professor Gómez' research focuses on the politics of global health policy, with a focus on emerging middle-income countries. He is the author of several books, and his most recent is titled Junk Food Politics: How Beverage and Fast Food Industries are Reshaping Emerging Economies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). In 2022, he led The Lancet’s first series on political science and global health and has served as co-editor for other major journal special issues. 

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Adeola Oni-Orisan. who is an Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UC-Davis. Dr. Oni-Orisan holds an MD from Harvard Medical School and a PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF and is an expert in community-centered research, qualitative research, critical race theory, Black feminist studies, and science and technology studies. She has conducted research on issues related to reproductive health, global health, development, religion, and informal sites of care in Nigeria, Zambia, and the United States. Her work on the production of statistics related to maternal mortality has been prominently featured in the wonderful edited volume by Vincanne Adams, Metrics: What Counts in Global Health and PJ Brown and Svea Closser’s Foundations of Global Health: An Interdisciplinary Reader. More recently, she’s published on COVID-19 and the political geography of racialization in San Francisco. Her recent article, published in Global Public Health -- “The Trouble with Maternal Death Narratives” -- critically examines how stories of women dying during childbirth have been used as a tool to mobilize support for global health interventions aimed at women in poor countries.