Antiblackness and Global Health: Placing the Sierra Leonean Ebola Epidemic in the Colonial Wake
Venue
This event will be held in-person. The venue is the Violet Laidlaw Room, 6th Floor, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square.A networking lunch will take place at 12:00 BST, followed by Dr Hirsch's talk which will run from 12:30-14:00 BST. Guests are then invited to stay for coffee until 14:30 BST.
Media
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Description
Dr Lioba Hirsch, University of Liverpool
This talk draws on Black Studies to explore how antiblackness is entangled in the field of global health. In doing so it seeks to challenge geographical, theoretical and disciplinary boundaries to move towards a transatlantic reading of antiblackness/white supremacy in global health thinking, practice and interventions. By engaging both Black Studies and postcolonial theory to read the British-led international response to the 2014-2016 Sierra Leonean Ebola Virus Disease epidemic, it introduces a Black/African reading which reveals postcolonial silences and the epistemic and physical structures which uphold it. It argues that an engagement with Black scholars on both sides of the Atlantic offers important and critical perspectives, which speak to the deep-seated nature and longstanding presence of antiblackness in medical and humanitarian practice and works towards an awareness of the longue durée (Sharpe, 2016) of antiblackness in relation to Eurocentric conceptualisations of Black health and humanity in Sierra Leone.
Key speakers
- Dr Lioba Hirsch, University of Liverpool