The foreign gaze: authorship in academic global health
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 that are now high-income countries experienced significant improvements in health outcomes and equity, that is, an ‘ideal’ of local people writing about local issues for a local audience. They deploy this ‘ideal’ not as a prescription, but as a heuristic device. By applying this sense of ‘ideal’, they wrestle, rhetorically, with three questions related to imbalances in authorship. The questions are: (1) What if the foreign gaze is necessary? (2) What if the foreign gaze is inconsequential? (3) What if the foreign gaze is corrupting?
Abimbola S (2019) The foreign gaze: authorship in academic global health, BMJ Global Health 2019; 4:e002068.