This editorial is based on the author’s experiences as a journal editor, and an academic who has been a local researcher and a foreign researcher. It is also based on a constructed ‘ideal’ of how things might have been without global health research partnerships, and when (circa late 19th to mid-20th century) many of the countries […]
Countries in the Global South continue to struggle to train and retain good researchers and practitioners to address local, regional and global health challenges. As a result, there is an ongoing reliance on the Global North for solutions to local problems and an inability to develop alternative approaches to problem solving that take local (non-northern) […]
In this book Madison Powers and Ruth Faden develop an innovative theory of structural injustice that links human rights norms and fairness norms. Norms of both kinds are grounded in an account of well-being. Their well-being account provides the foundation for human rights, explains the depth of unfairness of systematic patterns of disadvantage, and locates […]
Power is a critical concept to understand and transform health policy and systems. Power manifests implicitly or explicitly at multiple levels—local, national and global—and is present at each actor interface, therefore shaping all actions, processes and outcomes. Analysing and engaging with power has important potential for improving our understanding of the underlying causes of inequity, […]
Northern voices dominate Global Health discussions. How can it be acceptable that these groups continue to dominate in deciding what problems we think about in Global Health and how we approach them? The most excellent research study or Global Health program risks failure unless it is informed by and contextualized by the people close to […]
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, […]
Striking disparities in access to healthcare and in health outcomes are major characteristics of health across the globe. This inequitable state of global health and how it could be improved has become a highly popularized field of academic study. In a series of articles in this journal the roles of power and politics in global […]
This blog summarises a set of discussions on vulnerability, agency and resilience in a meeting organised by REACH it is framed around the paradox that: on the one hand research can be powerful tool for social justice in ensuring that interventions are evidence based; but on the other, there is need to protect ‘the vulnerable’ […]
Carrying out research on the mechanisms and treatments of disease in sub-Saharan Africa is often conducted in the most traditional and patriarchal communities. These social structures complicate such processes as gaining consent and giving participants feedback on the findings. But researchers have begun to learn an important lesson: by making an effort to better understand […]
In this blog Rosemary Morgan outlines the ways in which power and privilege can be manifested within the teaching of health systems research. This includes in teaching processes as well as institutions. It touches on efforts to decolonise curricula and whether traditional teaching reproduces inequities; explores how gender effects how students view their tutors; and introduces an […]