Critical Global Health Studies

The Program in Critical Global Health Studies recognizes that the impediments to health equity globally cannot be solved by any particular medical specialty alone or without the inclusion of the social sciences, ethics or humanistic inquiry. Solutions to the most challenging global health problems will require the engagement of all these parties and formative and important contributions must be made to all fields. While the field of social medicine has exposed the importance of thinking about the structures and systemic issues that affect health, our affiliates seek to think about these structures globally.  

Our areas of expertise, from global health clinical practice, international public health, anthropology, sociology, history and bioethics convenes diverse perspectives to confront challenges at the level of patient care, policy, and historically produced inequities emerging from the legacies of colonialism, contemporary power inequities and health challenges. Our approach aims to provide humanist and social science informed analysis and to identify sites of social intervention. 

Map of Health

Upcoming Events

12:00 pm
March 31
A new episode of “For the Medical Record” will be published March 31! Join us in our conversation with medical student Walker Magrath about his recent work as a scholarly concentrator in the history of medicine. In 2022, Walker published an article in Annals of Internal Medicine titled The Fall of the Nation’s First Gender-Affirming Surgery Clinic. In this episode, we discuss the history of this gender-affirming surgery clinic here at Johns Hopkinshow studying the medical humanities and medical history can improve medical education and practiceand the continued struggle for equity in LGBTQIA+ healthcare. Thanks for listening!  Subscribe to our podcast “For the Medical Record” to be alerted when new episodes drop – you can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
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Past Events

March 15, 2023
1:00 pm

New “For the Medical Record” Mini Episode with Alexandre White Released

A new episode of “For the Medical Record” will be published March 15! In one of our mini episodes based on colloquium talks given here at Hopkins, we speak to Alexandre White about his book Epidemic Orientalism: Race, Capital, and the Governance of Infectious Disease (Stanford University Press, 2023). The launch of this book was presented on February 7, 2023 as part of the Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine & Technology's colloquium series. Subscribe to our podcast “For the Medical Record” to be alerted when new episodes drop – you can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
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February 28, 2023
12:00 pm

New “For the Medical Record” Episode Released

A new episode of "For the Medical Record" will be published February 28! Join us in our conversation with Caleb Alexander, MD, MS, and Jason Chernesky, PhD, about the Opioid Industry Documents Archive. Both based at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Alexander is a practicing internist and epidemiologist, and Dr. Chernesky is a historian of medicine and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Opioid Industry Research Postdoctoral Fellow. Taking the OIDA's collection of documents as the starting point, we discuss commercial determinants of health, geographies of empathy across American drug epidemics, what litigation documents can tell us about public health, and writing the “second draft” of the story of the opioid epidemic. Subscribe to our podcast "For the Medical Record" to be alerted when new episodes drop - you can do this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
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October 21, 2022
Media, Data, & Health / Medicine, Science, & Humanities / Race, Racism, & Health
10:00 am / 6:00 pm

Conference: Achieving Health Equity in a World of Data

For more information and to join us live, or to watch a replay, visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/events/achieving-health-equity-data-conf/
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June 2, 2022
Critical Global Health Studies / Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society

Making Space for Social Medicine in Medical School Curricula: Transnational Perspectives and Pedagogy

Title: Making Space for Social Medicine in Medical School Curricula: Transnational Perspectives and Pedagogy What: Online Global Social Medicine Workshop When: June 1-2, 2022 For more info: https://globalsocialmedicine.org/online-workshop-making-space-for-social-medicine-inn-medical-school-curricula-transnational-perspectives-and-pedagogy/ Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/global-social-medicine-network-online-workshop-tickets-319707332237 Focus: Illness and healing can never fully be separated from social context. Yet while medical education around the world has legible standards for bioscientific subject materials, we are far more uneven in how we teach the social sciences necessary for the study of health and medicine. This event, sponsored by the Global Social Medicine Network, brings together educators from four continents on the challenges and opportunities for teaching social medicine in the 21st century.
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June 1, 2022
Critical Global Health Studies / Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society

Making Space for Social Medicine in Medical School Curricula: Transnational Perspectives and Pedagogy

Title: Making Space for Social Medicine in Medical School Curricula: Transnational Perspectives and Pedagogy What: Online Global Social Medicine Workshop When: June 1-2, 2022 For more info: https://globalsocialmedicine.org/online-workshop-making-space-for-social-medicine-inn-medical-school-curricula-transnational-perspectives-and-pedagogy/ Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/global-social-medicine-network-online-workshop-tickets-319707332237 Focus: Illness and healing can never fully be separated from social context. Yet while medical education around the world has legible standards for bioscientific subject materials, we are far more uneven in how we teach the social sciences necessary for the study of health and medicine. This event, sponsored by the Global Social Medicine Network, brings together educators from four continents on the challenges and opportunities for teaching social medicine in the 21st century.
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May 6, 2022
Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society / Media, Data, & Health / Race, Racism, & Health / Reproduction, Health, & Society
9:30 am / 6:00 pm

Conference: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine

Title: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine

What: Two-day hybrid conference, for more information visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/ 

Where: Hybrid – Virtual & Armstrong 150 West

When: Thursday, May 5th and Friday, May 6th

Who: All are welcome to attend virtually. In person registration is limited to invited speakers and guests and Hopkins Affiliates. Numbers will be capped to ensure distancing.

How to Register: Visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/ 

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May 5, 2022
Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society / Media, Data, & Health / Race, Racism, & Health / Reproduction, Health, & Society
9:30 am / 6:00 pm

Conference: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine

Title: Reckoning with Race & Racism in Academic Medicine

What: Two-day hybrid conference, for more information visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/ 

Where: Hybrid – Virtual & Armstrong 150 West

When: Thursday, May 5th and Friday, May 6th

Who: All are welcome to attend virtually. In person registration is limited to invited speakers and guests and Hopkins Affiliates. Numbers will be capped to ensure distancing.

How to Register: Visit https://hopkinshistoryofmedicine.org/conf-reckoning-with-racism-med/ 

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November 12, 2021
Critical Pedagogies of Health and Society / Medicine, Science, & Humanities
9:00 am / 5:00 pm

Trans/Medicine Workshop

Medicine and medical understandings have played prominent and problematic features in framing transgender historiography. Often, the critical role of trans people in shaping and contesting medical knowledge and practices has been overlooked. In this workshop, we propose to turn the question around and ask what transgender history says about the history of medicine. How can we use transgender history and trans medicine as a lens to analyze broader developments in medicine? What does trans medicine tell us about knowledge production, medical technologies, and clinical practices in modern medicine? This workshop seeks to illuminate the history of trans/medicine as a broad analytical field with a variety of actors (activists, patients, media, institutions, experts), technologies (paper, pamphlets, membership magazines, newspaper articles, diagnostic tools, hormones, scalpels), and practices (community meetings, parties, rallies, blood tests, clinical examinations, construction of nosologies). The workshop approaches history as a meaningful way of responding to pressing issues for trans people and trans medicine in the present. Organizers: Ketil Slagstad, MD and Jacob Moses, PhD  
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September 22, 2021
Media, Data, & Health / Race, Racism, & Health
5:00 pm

Susceptibility, Surveillance, and Stigma: A Conversation on History, Infectious Disease, and Genomics

Robert H. Levi Leadership Symposium in Bioethics and Health Policy Susceptibility, Surveillance, and Stigma: A Conversation on History, Infectious Disease, and Genomics Modern public health practices for both infectious and noninfectious diseases rely heavily on screening technologies that can predict disease or susceptibility to disease before symptoms are present. Testing technologies have focused on transmission for infectious diseases and on inheritance or susceptibility for genetic diseases, with each category raising social and ethical issues for the people and populations tested and ‘labeled’ with disease. Increasingly, the distinctions between the two types of testing (and diseases) are dissolving, raising a new constellation of social and ethical issues. This public event will bring together a panel of experts to explore how screening technologies for infectious and noninfectious diseases have been used over time to understand and categorize not only disease, but also the people who have the disease. This moderated conversation will explore historical perspectives on (primarily genetic and infectious) disease causation and the relationship of causation to surveillance and stigma, with particular attention to the interplay with social and biological understandings of race. Panelists: Amy Fairchild, Dean and Professor, College of Public Health, Ohio State University Robin Scheffler, Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Quayshawn Spencer, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania Moderator: Jeremy Greene, William H. Welch Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine, and Director of the Department of the History of Medicine and the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, Johns Hopkins University
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