Recap — Imagining Health Otherwise: Critical Perspectives in Global Health Workshop

What does it actually mean to be healthy? This is one of the questions that this year’s Critical Perspectives in Global Health Workshop sought to address and, more importantly, challenge. Anthropologist Kristina Baines raised this question in her keynote on the importance of Maya and Garifuna approaches to health and the limitations of biomedical understandings of health, with their narrow focus on physiological change (see Jain 2013; Kleinman 1997; Squier 2007). The World Health Organization proposes a more expansive conceptualization that frames health as physical, mental, and social wellbeing. However, Baines cautioned against celebrating this layering of different forms of health. Instead, she proposed the grounded theory Embodied Ecological Heritage: with embodied sensory experience the distinctions between these categories of health melt away to become singular and expansive. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Garifuna and Maya communities in Belize, and Garifuna communities in New York City, Baines invited the audience into botanical and food worlds: scenes of making traditional hadot (Garifuna) and caldo (Maya) soups, the sensation of steam rising to the cooks’ faces, the scents, the stirring, the scouring of forests and New York City Chinese and Korean grocery stores for the right herbs. Ethnographic research ensures that these practices are encountered in context, revealing them to not just be physical but to also pull together socialities, moral values, and Indigenous cosmologies.  

Embodied Ecological Heritage emerges from Baines’s feminist and decolonial ethnographic approach. This kind of ethnographic research foregrounds the work of interlocutors as theorizations of health in their own right. These theorizations both challenge the onto-epistemological frameworks of biomedicine and strategically mobilize them: Baines recounted a Maya clinic that opened beside a biomedical hospital in southern Belize solicited pharmaceutical researchers to evaluate their herbs. Baines noted that while the researchers affirmed what Maya healers already new about the effectiveness of the herbs, the researchers did so through positivist modes of isolating material properties: The Maya healers, however, understood that the scent of incense and the sounds of chanting were just as therapeutic, thereby, strategically soliciting and subverting biomedical knowledge-making, often entangled in colonial technologies of domination (Fanon 1967) to support Indigenous forms of healing.

Research updates from 2024 Seed Grant recipients similarly imagined health otherwise. Andrew Dawson’s examination of trust and compliance with public health directives across multiple countries, showed that existing literature underestimates the importance of political trust. Christo El Morr also brought policy into the picture with research that uses large language models to monitor how disability issues are debated and understood on social media, producing a dashboard for potential use by advocates to transform disability policy. Raju Das’s work in Canada and India showed that the traditional global health metric “population” fails to account for the physical and social injuries of labour in a warming world.

The 2025 Seed Grant pitches affirmed the multiplicities of “health” in Global Health practice. Rachel Silver will examine how mid-level actors in NGOs, policymaking, and education in Malawi are theorizing alternative systems for development work in the wake of the recent USAID cuts. Fawzia Gibson-Fall illuminates the role of everyday securitization of global health in Senegal, contrasting with the literature’s overreliance on the idea of states of emergency. Nilanjana Ganguli inquires into the broader health impacts of the practice of sex-for-fish in Malawi, focusing on women’s stories, gendered labour, and climate change. Jesse Sam proposed arts-based research with racialized caregivers of children with autism to better understand their experiences and communicate those experiences to policymakers.

Imagining health otherwise unsettles and revises taken-for-granted of health from biomedicine and global health. Social scientists’ interventions into imaginations of health emphasize that health is dynamic, political, embodied. It is as much a matter of established medical test results and social determinants as it is about identity, kinship, and belonging in more-than-human worlds.

This year’s CPGH workshop demonstrated the astounding work York researchers are conducting and the critical problem-solving approach they are taking. The CPGH Program continues to support these endeavours with the CPGH Seed Grant Program which awarded four selected applicants seed grants (worth up to $7,000 CAD each).

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