The Foreign Gaze
Essays on Global Health
The field of research known as academic global health is in the midst of a scientific debate that is questioning its epistemological foundations. This book contributes to that questioning. Through a series of essays that weave together personal narratives and conceptual reflections, it shows how as researchers in academic global health, we defer to a distant, powerful, foreign gaze, whose power shapes our pose and what we can see or say. Many of our accepted knowledge practices – how we make, us...
Author’s note
This work was funded, in part, by the Australian Government through the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grant number APP1139631 and through the Australian Research Council (ARC) grant number DE230101551.
The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government, the NHMRC, or the ARC.
Publisher: IRD Éditions
Place of publication: Marseille
Published on OpenEdition Books: January 7, 2025
Digital ISBN: 978-2-7099-3044-4
DOI: 10.4000/131av
Series: Santé globale
Year of publication: 2024
ISBN (Print version): 978-2-7099-3042-0
Number of pages: 149
The field of research known as academic global health is in the midst of a scientific debate that is questioning its epistemological foundations. This book contributes to that questioning. Through a series of essays that weave together personal narratives and conceptual reflections, it shows how as researchers in academic global health, we defer to a distant, powerful, foreign gaze, whose power shapes our pose and what we can see or say. Many of our accepted knowledge practices – how we make, use, share and value knowledge – are steeped in structural prejudice and heavily peppered by epistemic injustice. To transform academic global health, we need a critical mass of people who can articulate why many of our accepted knowledge practices are unfair, people who know where to aim their efforts to entrench just practices, people who can get others to join in those efforts. This book was written to help build that critical mass.
Dr Seye Abimbola is an associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. His teaching and research focus on learning and governance in health systems, and on epistemic injustice and knowledge practices in global health. His work draws on his experiences living, studying and working in two places forever marked by British colonisation – Nigeria and Australia. He has been a British Medical Journal (BMJ) Clegg Scholar (2007), a Rotary Foundation Scholar at the University of Sydney (2009–2010 and 2013–2016), the Prince Claus Chair in Equity and Development at Utrecht University (2020–2022), and a Radulovacki Visiting Scholar in Global Health at Northwestern University (2023–2024). He also served as the inaugural editor-in-chief of BMJ Global Health (2015–2024). In 2023, Vox named him to their “Future Perfect 50” list of “scientists, thinkers, scholars, writers and activists building a more perfect future”.
Only the text can be used under the Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Other elements (illustrations, attached files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.
La recherche interventionnelle en santé des populations
Concepts, méthodes, applications
François Alla, Linda Cambon and Valéry Ridde
2024
Population health intervention research
Concepts, methods, applications
François Alla, Linda Cambon and Valéry Ridde
2023
Investigación de intervenciones en salud poblacional
Conceptos, métodos y aplicaciones
François Alla, Linda Cambon and Valéry Ridde
2024
La recherche interventionnelle en santé des populations
Concepts, méthodes, applications
François Alla, Linda Cambon and Valéry Ridde
2024
Population health intervention research
Concepts, methods, applications
François Alla, Linda Cambon and Valéry Ridde
2023
Investigación de intervenciones en salud poblacional
Conceptos, métodos y aplicaciones
François Alla, Linda Cambon and Valéry Ridde
2024
