The Global Health Politics Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Send us a text

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 a text

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 a text

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.

Send us a text

This week's podcast features a conversation with Dr. Jallicia Jolly. Dr. Jolly is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College, and a poet, public scholar, equity practitioner, and reproductive justice organizer. In the podcast, she discusses what led her to focus on the subject of HIV organizing and grassroots women's reproductive health in her work as a practitioner and a scholar concerned with transforming structures of power, advancing equity, and affirming health justice. She shares what aspects of research and ethnography are most meaningful to her, the people who have influenced and shaped her thinking, and inspiring advice she has for young scholars beginning their journey. 

Send us a text

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 a text

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 a text

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 a text

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 a text

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 a text

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, I sit down with Brown University political scientist Prerna Singh to discuss her latest book project, Moral Vaccination: How Ideas and Institutions Controlled Contagion in China and India. Our wide-ranging conversation explores how states generate compliance with public health interventions, grounded in a comparison of India and China's efforts to eradicate smallpox. Her important work suggests the need to incorporate a broader understanding of human motivations that goes beyond economic rationality, drawing on insights from a range of academic disciplines. Dr. Singh is past President of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.