Description
COVID-19 and Dreams of a Radical Re-visioning of Global Health Engagement
James R Walker (A faculty in Philosophy and Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies at DePaul University, USA)
In this paper the author calls for a radical re-visioning of our engagement with global health inequity. The current COVID-19 pandemic, and its catastrophic effects upon communities within the Global South, reveals the inadequate foundations of the current paradigm of global health engagement operative in the world.
The author identifies how a problematic notion of ‘progress’, and the corresponding notion of ‘regress’, which presuppose a goal of ‘equality’ with the West are central to this inadequacy. This notion not only fails to address, but, moreover, obfuscates and augments, the true illnesses at the root of global health inequity.
Drawing on the Black Radical Tradition, the author suggests that in place of this deeply problematic notion of progress, we must begin centring one that takes as its ultimate goal the deconstruction of the hegemonic power relations at the core of global health inequity.
