Pardee Center Completes Spring 2025 Global Health Politics Workshop Speaker Series

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future has concluded the sixth semester of its Global Health Politics Workshop (GHPW) speaker series.

The five-part Spring 2025 series included talks about primary health care reforms across nine countries; the relationship between images, health, and security; the prevalence of unnecessary hysterectomy in India; how legacies of colonialism affected responses to the 2014-2016 West African Ebola crisis; and the urgent need to reimagine global health by shifting power to people and institutions in the Global South. The monthly series, which has included 25 events since its launch in 2022, will continue in the fall. Previous talks are available to watch on the Pardee Center’s YouTube channel.

The speaker series is part of an initiative led by Pardee Center Faculty Associate Prof. Joseph Harris with the goal of bringing together leading social scientists from the disciplines of anthropology, political science, and sociology to advance the understanding of health phenomena in a globally interconnected world.

Last spring, the initiative launched the Global Health Politics podcast, featuring conversations with leading scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and activists working on critical issues in global health. In the most recent episode, Prof. Harris explores the actions taken by the Trump administration to dismantle U.S. foreign aid and the consequences that these actions will have for global health. The conversation features Dr. Beth Cameron (former Senior Adviser to USAID); Nidhi Bouri (former Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID); Dr. Brooke Nichols (Associate Professor of Global Health at BU and creator of a U.S. aid freeze impact tracker); and Sheena Adams (Global Communications Director for The Accountability Lab, which launched its own Global Aid Freeze Tracker). Listen to the episode here.