Antiblackness and Global Health: A Response to Ebola in the Colonial Wake

Join the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future for the next talk in its Global Health Politics Workshop series. The event, titled "Antiblackness and Global Health: A Response to Ebola in the Colonial Wake,” will feature Lioba Hirsch (Wellcome Research Fellow and Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh). In her new book, "Antiblackness and Global Health: A Response to Ebola in the Colonial Wake," Hirsch traces the legacies of colonialism across the landscape of global health in Sierra Leone, showing how this history underpinned the international response to Ebola. The book aims to equip critical scholars, medical and humanitarian practitioners, policy makers and health activists with the tools and knowledge to challenge antiblackness in global health practice and politics. Hirsch argues that Black Studies can inform future research on medical interventions in Africa by unpacking postcolonial silences, centering Black perspectives, and highlighting the endurance of colonial infrastructures in the present. This monthly speaker series brings 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. The series operates in a hybrid format to accommodate participation in person and via Zoom.