The Global Health Politics Podcast

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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.

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In this episode, I sit down with two researchers doing very exciting - but also very different - kinds of research on global health politics. In the first conversation, I talk with Dr. Katharina Krause, an international relations scholar who is a Research Associate at the University of Tubingen about her book project on the relationship between health security and images of infectious diseases like Ebola. In the second conversation, I talk with Dr. Brooke Bocast, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western Washington University about her book, If Books Fail, Try Beauty: Educated Womanhood and the New East Africa. The book won the Council on Anthropology and Education's Outstanding Book Award; the Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize; and was named Honorable Mention for the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. Both great conversations.

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In this episode, Joseph Harris sits down with Adeoye "Oye" Owolewa. A pharmacist recognized for his efforts to protect public health, Dr. Owolewa has served as the Shadow Representative to Congress for the nation's capital since his election in November 2020. He shares his experience as a Nigerian American working in politics, advocating for D.C. statehood at a time when the nation's capital was under federal occupation by National Guard troops, a federalized Metropolitan Police Department, and ICE agents. He reflects on his experience working as a pharmacist at a time when Medicaid is being cut, scientific research for drug development has been slashed, tens of thousands of federal civil servants have been let go, and U.S. global health and development institutions have been decimated. And he offers his vision as a candidate for a seat on the Council of the District of Columbia, also known as the D.C. Council.