Epistemic Injustice in Global Health

Eugene Richardson, Harvard Medical School

Salmaan Keshavjee, Harvard Medical School

This workshop will help explore the creation of a BMJ Global Health Commission on Epistemic Injustice, the aim of which will be to create a space for students, academics, and global health practitioners to join the rising tide of communities around the world working to challenge the structural and epistemic violence that stems from historical colonialism and contemporary neocolonialist control. We aim to work toward global health futures that are anticolonial, antiracist, and nonexploitative by exploring the following questions: 1) How has the colonial and imperial experience been codified in health doctrines, health systems, representations of suffering, and divisions between disciplines (including their methodologies and their objects)? 2) What are alternative understandings of how we experience illness, how we care for the sick, and how we organize systems to promote health and wellbeing? 3) How can we delink knowledge production about health phenomena from both Eurocentric modernization discourse as well as neocolonial control?