The Global Health Politics Podcast

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In this episode of the podcast, Joseph Harris sits down with William and Mary Professor Brent Kaup and Lehigh Professor Kelly Austin to discuss their new book, The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease. Their exciting and insightful new book takes readers to the exurban homes of northern Virginia; the burgeoning agricultural outposts of Mato Grosso, Brazil; and the smallholder coffee farms of the Bududa District of eastern Uganda to illustrate how the broader financialization of society is intimately intertwined with both the creation of landscapes more conducive to vector-borne disease and the failure to prevent and cure such diseases throughout the world. In the process, we learn about the challenges of writing the book during COVID-19, the changing landscape of sociology, and how the authors think about research.

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At a moment when the world is grappling with an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that is spiraling out of control, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Mardia Stone. Dr. Stone served as Ebola Response Team Coordinator at the WHO and Senior Advisor to the Incident Manager of Liberia's national Ebola response. She is author of Collapse and Resiliency: The Inside Story of Liberia's Unprecedented Ebola Response. Written with Tolbert Nyenswah, Collapse and Resiliency is the only book written by an African official on the Ebola response.

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with anthropologist Susan Erikson. They talk about her extraordinary new book, Investable: When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance, A Cautionary Tale. The book examines the World Bank's novel efforts - under former World Bank President Jim Yong Kim - to mobilize private finance to support pandemic response in the world's poorest nations. While the Bank succeeded in rolling out pandemic bonds, Erikson shows that pandemic bonds did not fulfill their potential. Who did the bonds serve? What was their impact? And how did they become a new tool for pandemic response efforts in the first place? They delve into these issues and more in this enjoyable and illuminating conversation.

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down to talk with Dr. Sapna Desai, a Senior Fellow at the Population Council Institute in New Delhi, India. A public health expert with over 20 years of experience working on women's health in India, she holds a PhD in epidemiology and population from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Master's in Population and International Health from Harvard University. They talk about maternal health, sterilization and population control, the problem of unnecessary hysterectomy in India, feminism, evidence and activism, and the movement to decolonize global health.

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with Dr. Lioba Hirsch, a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. They talk about her new book, Antiblackness and Global Health: A Response to Ebola in the Colonial Wake, as well as racism, decolonization, North-South power dynamics, global health governance, inequalities in relation to COVID-19, and infectious disease response in Africa.