Faculty Fellow Joseph Harris to Convene Symposium on Global Health and the Social Sciences

Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow Joseph Harris is convening the first-ever Symposium on Global Health and the Social Sciences on Nov. 9 and 10, with 25 invited sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists whose research focuses on various aspects of global health.

The Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future is sponsoring this event at Boston University as part of Prof. Harris’s Pardee Center Faculty Fellowship.

The symposium will feature brief presentations from a representative of each discipline in five thematic areas: global health governance, reproductive health and human rights, universalism, infectious disease response, and access to pharmaceuticals. The goals of the gathering are to share key research threads and findings among the disciplines and suggest potential new interdisciplinary research agendas going forward. A report of the conference will be published and a manuscript will be developed for submission to a leading social science journal.

Prof. Harris, Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department, is interested in the intersection of global health and public policy, with a specific focus on the policy aspects of how different countries approach access to health care. His book, Achieving Access: Professional Movements and the Politics of Health Universalism, was published earlier this year by Cornell University Press. He was awarded a two-year Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellowship in 2015 with seed funding to support his efforts to convene the symposium.

 

Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow Joseph Harris conducts comparative and historical research that lies at the intersection of sociology, public policy, and global health. He is the author of Achieving Access: Professional Movements and the Politics of Health Universalism (Cornell University Press, 2017). His current Fulbright-funded research project explores the diffusion of Thailand’s public health policies abroad. His other work examines the politics of social policy in the industrializing world; comparative understanding of state capacity, bureaucratic autonomy, and the developmental state; and the emergent sociology of global health. Prof. Harris has served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank, most recently as Specialist on the Political Economy of Healthcare Reform for the Japan-World Bank Project on Universal Coverage. He is a past recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Henry Luce Scholarship and holds a Master’s in Public Affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and served as Lecturer at the University of Chicago’s School of Public Policy Studies before joining the faculty at BU. In 2017, Prof. Harris received the Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching. He currently serves as Associate Editor at Social Science and Medicine.