ABSTRACT Drawing on the reflections and discussions from a special session at the 2021 Global Health Bioethics Network summer school, this paper has summarised the key challenges faced by Frontline Workers (FWs) across research sites in Africa and Asia in performing the everyday ‘body work’ entailed in operationalising global health research. Using a ‘body work’ […]
There are contrasting opinions of what global health (GH) curricula should contain and limited discussion on whose voices should shape it. In GH education, those with first-hand expertise of living and working in the contexts discussed in GH classrooms are often absent when designing curricula. To address this, we developed a new model of curriculum […]
Within multi-disciplinary global health interventions, anthropologists find themselves navigating complex relationships of power. In this article, I off er a critical reflection on this negotiated terrain, drawing on my experience as an embedded ethnographer in a four-year adolescent sexual and reproductive health research intervention in Latin America. I critique the notion that the transformative potential […]
While ‘procedural ethics’ provides essential frameworks for governing global health research, reflecting on ‘ethics in practice’ offers important insights into addressing ethically important moments that arise in everyday research. Particularly for ethnographic research, renowned for it’s fluid and spontaneous nature, engaging with ‘ethics in practice’ has the potential to enhance research practice within global health. […]
In his recent commentary, Gorik Ooms argues that “denying that researchers, like all humans, have personal opinions … drives researchers’ personal opinion underground, turning global health science into unconscious dogmatism or stealth advocacy, avoiding the crucial debate about the politics and underlying normative premises of global health.” These ‘unconscious’ dimensions of global health are as […]
Global health research is essentially a normative undertaking: we use it to propose policies that ought to be implemented. To arrive at a normative conclusion in a logical way requires at least one normative premise, one that cannot be derived from empirical evidence alone. But there is no widely accepted normative premise for global health, […]
The case for undertaking policy analysis has been made by a number of scholars and practitioners. However, there has been much less attention given to how to do policy analysis, what research designs, theories or methods best inform policy analysis. This paper begins by looking at the health policy environment, and some of the challenges to researching […]
‘Researcher identity’ affects global health research in profound and complex ways. Anthropologists in particular have led the way in portraying the multiple, and sometimes tension-generating, identities that researchers ascribe to themselves, or have ascribed to them, in their places of research. However, the central importance of researcher identity in the ethical conduct of global health […]
The practice of community based participatory research (CBPR) has evolved over the past 20 years with the recognition that health equity is best achieved when academic researchers form collaborative partnerships with communities. This article theorizes the possibility that core principles of CBPR cannot be realistically applied unless unequal power relations are identified and addressed. It […]
This paper discusses health policy and systems research in complex and rapidly changing contexts. It focuses on ethical issues at stake for researchers working with government policy makers to provide evidence to inform major health systems change at scale, particularly when the dynamic nature of the context and ongoing challenges to the health system can […]