The Sociology of Global Health

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Harris ◽  
Alexandre White
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Health It ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literature Reviews ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
New Research

Over the past two decades, a sociology of global health has emerged. While this new subfield takes up some themes and issues that are familiar to the discipline as a whole—among them organizations, social movements, and the social construction of illness—it has also posed new questions and opened new research pathways by formulating and testing theory in environments radically different from the United States. This work has forced sociologists to confront the ethnocentrism of research paradigms that are grounded in the American experience and to consider classical assumptions and constructs in fruitful new ways. Notable recent literature reviews have taken up the issue of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, comparative healthcare systems, and the sociology of development. However, this review is the first to outline the contours of a coherent sociology of global health. It addresses several questions: What issues are being taken up in this emergent subfield? What added value comes from turning scholarly attention beyond our borders? And what new research agendas lie on the horizon?

Turning the Tide

2021 ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Elizabeth H. Bradley ◽  
Lauren A. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Bush Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leadership Role ◽  
Health It ◽  
Emergency Plan ◽  
National Interests ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hiv Aids

This chapter describes the principles of grand strategy as applied to global health and public health. It analyzes President George W. Bush's program, called the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (known as PEPFAR). Developed largely in secret and placed outside the traditional USAID bureaucracy, the PEPFAR program pole vaulted the United States into a leadership role in global health. The chapter then highlights how the use of grand strategic principles resulted in a highly successful, if still limited, global health intervention. The Bush Administration articulated explicit goals, or ends, and connected those to the larger ecology of national interests related to demonstrating American morality, and protecting the United States from the threat of pandemic HIV/AIDS. However, PEPFAR as a strategy was incomplete. It failed to address critical root causes of the spread of HIV/AIDS—the social and economic conditions in which such pathogens emerge and spread.

When People Come First

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Health Science ◽  
Health It ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
New Research ◽  
Health Enterprise ◽  
Conceptual Work

This book critically assesses the expanding field of global health. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the medical, social, political, and economic dimensions of the global health enterprise through vivid case studies and bold conceptual work. The book demonstrates the crucial role of ethnography as an empirical lantern in global health, arguing for a more comprehensive, people-centered approach. Topics include the limits of technological quick fixes in disease control, the moral economy of global health science, the unexpected effects of massive treatment rollouts in resource-poor contexts, and how right-to-health activism coalesces with the increased influence of the pharmaceutical industry on health care. The chapters explore the altered landscapes left behind after programs scale up, break down, or move on. We learn that disease is really never just one thing, technology delivery does not equate with care, and biology and technology interact in ways we cannot always predict. The most effective solutions may well be found in people themselves, who consistently exceed the projections of experts and the medical-scientific, political, and humanitarian frameworks in which they are cast. This book sets a new research agenda in global health and social theory and challenges us to rethink the relationships between care, rights, health, and economic futures.

Slaves and society in Western Africa, c. 1445—c. 1700

1980 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. D. Fage
Keyword(s):  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Western Africa ◽  
The Social ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Limited Supply ◽  
Sub Saharan

Published European first-hand accounts of the coastlands from Senegal to Angola for the period c. 1445-c. 1700 are examined to see what light they throw on the extent to which institutions of servitude in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa were autonomous developments or a response to external demands for African slaves. It seems clear that when, in the early years of this period, European traders first approached societies along the western African coasts, they were commonly offered what they called ‘slaves’ in exchange for the goods they had brought. But it would be wrong to conclude from this that a slave class was necessarily a feature of western African coastal societies when these were first contacted by Europeans. It is clear, for instance, that the Europeans preferred to deal with societies which had developed monarchical governments, whose leaders had control of sufficient surpluses to make trade worthwhile. The evidence suggests that in these societies most individuals were dependants of a ruling and entrepreneurial elite, but that there was also social mobility. A category of dependants that particularly attracted the notice of the European observers was women, whom men of power and wealth tended to accumulate as wives (and hence as the potential mothers of still more dependants). The necessarily limited supply of women may have been a factor encouraging such men to seek to increase their followings, and thus their status, power and wealth, by recruiting other dependants by forcible, judicial and economic means. While many such dependants, or their offspring, would be assimilated into the social groups commanded by their masters, the latter were certainly willing to contemplate using recently acquired or refractory recruits in other ways, such as exchanging them for alternative forms of wealth.

Transcontinental Modernism. M&G as an Unité d’habitation and a factory complex in Mozambique

2010 ◽  
pp. 70-73
Author(s):  
Ana Tostões ◽  
Maria Manuel Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Social Program ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Architectural Heritage ◽  
Technological Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Overseas Territories ◽  
Architectural Modernism

With the aim of contributing to the documentation and conservation of the modern architectural heritage, this paper presents Monteiro & Giro Complex (M&G), built during the 50’s in Quelimane, Mozambique, with the goal of stressing the modernity of the social program and the technological approach. If one wants to gain a better understanding of the worldwide Diaspora of architectural modernism, it is essential to document and analyse the important heritage of sub–Saharan Africa. Modern architectural debates have been reproduced, transformed, contested and sometimes even improved in distant lands and overseas territories. These contradictory aspects of Modernist practice are revealed in the programmatic, technological and structural M&G industrial Complex.

Women in Gabon

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire H. Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Central Africa ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
African Women ◽  
Female Population ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Tropical Woods ◽  
New Research ◽  
Export Revenue

Gabon, a small oil-rich country straddling the equator on the west coast of Africa, is the wealthiest of France’s former colonies. An early period of colonization in the 19th century resulted in disease, famine, and economic failure. The creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910 marked the beginning of the sustained lucrative exploitation of Gabon’s natural resources. Gabon began off-shore oil production while still a colony of France. Uranium was also discovered in the last decade of the French Equatorial African empire. Coupled with rich reserves in tropical woods, Gabon has achieved, since independence in 1960, a higher level of export revenue per capita of population than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa in the postcolonial era. However, significant inequality has characterized access to wealth through paid employment throughout the recorded history of monetized labor. While fortunes have been amassed by a minute proportion of the female population of Gabon associated with the ruling regime, and a professional female middle-class has emerged, inequalities of opportunity and reward continue to mark women’s experience of life in this little-known country of West Central Africa. The key challenge facing scholars researching the history of women in Gabon remains the relative lack of historical resources. While significant strides have been made over the past decade, research on women’s history in Francophone Africa published in English or French remains embryonic. French research on African women began to make a mark in the last decade of colonization, notably with the work of Denise Paulme, but then remained a neglected area for decades. The publication in 1994 of Les Africaines by French historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch was hailed at the time as a pioneering work in French historiography. But even this new research contained no analysis of and only a passing reference to women in Gabon.

Comparing breast cancer characteristics across Sub-Saharan Africa and the United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 92 ◽  
pp. S155 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Grover ◽  
M. Narasimhamurthy ◽  
R. Bhatia ◽  
C. Benn ◽  
K. Fearnhead ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Sub Saharan

Letter To The Editor

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 796-796
Author(s):  
Samuel L. Katz
Keyword(s):  
Oral Polio Vaccine ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Intestinal Immunity ◽  
Polio Vaccine ◽  
Polio Immunization ◽  
Individual Protection ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Community Protection ◽  
Central Nervous System Invasion

Drs Terry and Schneider raise legitimate questions regarding changes in polio immunization recommendations. In response to the former, although two doses of inactivated polio vaccine provide humoral immunity that will protect an individual against central nervous system invasion by wild or revertant attenuated polioviruses, they do not provide intestinal immunity, a valued asset of oral polio vaccine (OPV). Because we live in a global community where jet transportation enables one to move from a polio-endemic area to a polio-free area in less than one day, the introduction of wild polio viruses from sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia poses a legitimate threat and concern to those who wish to maintain community protection, in addition to individual protection, against possible reintroduction of wild virus to the United States.

The Effects of the Westward Movement on California's Growth and Development, 1900–1920

1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-35
Author(s):  
Frank L. Beach
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
United States Population ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Westward Movement ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact

Internal migration is a growing social phenomenon of today's America: a third of the United States population live in a different state from the one in which they have been born. This, however, has been a constant aspect of the American experience. The author of the present essay analyzes in an historical perspective the growth of California from 1900–1920 under the impact of the westward movement. The social, economic and political implications of the California development are the main features of this paper.

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