Going Public: Corporatizing Universal Health Amid Shifting Global Configurations, with Ramya Kumar and Anne-Emanuelle Birn
This seminar will explore the pivotal role of corporate players in universal health coverage ideologies and implementation, and critically examine social innovation-driven approaches to expanding primary care in low-income settings. It will first trace the evolving meanings of universal health/healthcare in global health politics and policy, analysing their close, often hidden, intertwining with corporate interests and exigencies. It will then juxtapose three ‘social innovations’ in health targeting niche 'markets' for lower-cost services in the Majority World, against three present-day examples of publicly financed and delivered primary healthcare (PHC), demonstrating what corporatization does to PHC, within deeply entrenched colonial-capitalist structures and discourses that normalize inferior care, private profit, and dispossession of peoples. The Seminar will end by drawing attention to the ongoing and accelerated expansion of private finance and philanthrocapitalist models in global health and their implications for healthcare access in the Majority World.
In preparation for this seminar, Dr. Kumar has recommended reading Going Public: The Unmaking and Remaking of Universal Healthcare and Private Financial Actors and Financialisation in Global Health.
Speaker Profiles
Ramya Kumar is a Senior Lecturer and medical doctor attached to the Department of Community and Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Jaffna, in northern Sri Lanka. In 2023, she was Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the United Nations University-International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ramya’s research interests include access to healthcare, politics of global health, gender and health, and applying critical feminist methodologies to health research. Her recent work explores health policy, health reform and gender and health, focusing primarily on Sri Lanka, and global health policy and politics, including a volume titled, Going Public: The Unmaking and Remaking of Universal Healthcare (Cambridge, 2023) co-authored with Anne-Emanuelle Birn. Ramya is currently Associate Editor with Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters and was recently Section Editor of the Handbook of Sex, Gender and Health: Perspective from South Asia (SpringerNature, 2025). She is currently a member of the Collective for the Political Determinants of Health (University of Oslo) and the Kuppi Collective, an independent group of academics committed to preserving free public education in Sri Lanka.
Anne-Emanuelle Birn is Professor of Global Development Studies and of Social and Behavioural Health Sciences (Dalla Lana School of Public Health) at the University of Toronto. Previously she was a professor at the New School in New York, worked at the Pan American Health Organization, and has been a visiting professor in Montevideo, Paris, Lisbon, and at the World Health Organization. Her research explores the history, politics, and political economy of global health, particularly in Latin America. Current projects examine: the history of child health in Uruguay; transnational perspectives on social activism and policy-making during the COVID-19 pandemic; social justice-oriented South-South health cooperation; and the health harms of Canadian extractivism. She has published widely in Latin American, African, Asian, North American, and European journals and presses and edited nine special journal issues in multiple languages. Her books include: Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary Mexico (Rochester, 2006); Comrades in Health: US Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home (Rutgers, 2013); Oxford University Press’s Textbook of Global Health (2009; 2017/18); Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (Duke, 2020); and Going Public: The Unmaking and Remaking of Universal Healthcare (Cambridge, 2023). She served on the Independent Panel on Global Governance for Health, and is currently a member of the Collective for the Political Determinants of Health (both based at the University of Oslo). Among other scholar-activist roles, she is a core member of the Canada country circle of the People’s Health Movement and has served as the North American regional representative on the Global Steering Council of the People’s Health Movement.
A former Canada Research Chair in International Health, she has been recognized among the top 100 Women Leaders in Global Health, and was named to the List of Canadian Women in Global Health. She is the 2023 recipient of the Arthur J. Viseltear Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Public Health History from the American Public Health Association and Columbia University.
Register below and join us on Wednesday, November 12, at 1:00 p.m. ET
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