univie: summer school Scientific World Conceptions – Global Health

About

‘Global health’ has attracted wide attention. This program will explore this interdisciplinary topic from a variety of different but interrelated perspectives. First, global health reveals significant health disparities: but what causes these, and which disparities are unjust and demand redress? How types of social oppression – such as, racism and heterosexism – relate to health injustices will be explored, alongside investigating the contentious role of advocacy in public health.

Second, global health reveals dilemmas between individual rights and communal benefits. For example, clinical trials funded by Western pharmaceutical companies benefit and exploit participants in low-income countries; measures to control the spread of Covid-19 protected and restricted individuals; and international differences in assisted dying legislation largely depend on how much a jurisdiction values individual autonomy. Such dilemmas are viewed through a philosophical bioethics/public health ethics lens.

Third, global health will be explored from a sociological and humanistic perspective, emphasizing how health is shaped by global interdependencies, power relations, and cultural meanings. Moving beyond biomedical paradigms, the sociology of health can highlight the social, political, and epistemological dimensions of illness, care, and inequality. In addition, Graphic Medicine as an innovative visual and narrative approach to representing experiences of vulnerability and global crisis, will be introduced

Course aim

History of efforts to account for what causes public health disparities, and what makes a disparity an injustice/inequity in need of intervention

Efforts to theorize how various types of social oppression relate to health injustices and the amelioration of those injustices

Role of advocacy in public health, including limits on the roles of public health experts in crafting social policies around issues such as immigration and climate change

Ethics of clinical trials by Western pharmaceutical companies that take place in low-income countries

Justification for liberty-limiting measures to control the spread of Covid-19 around the globe

International differences in forms of assisted dying and which, if any, are justifiable

The conceptual evolution from Public Health to One Health and Planetary Health, focusing on how sociological approaches reframe health as a relational and systemic phenomenon

Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, questioning how global health reproduces colonial hierarchies and epistemic injustices

Visual storytelling: how comics and graphic narratives contribute to understanding emotional labour, care, and social inequality in health

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