Interrogating the global health and development nexus: Critical viewpoints of neoliberalization and health in transnational spaces

• Published in: World development perspectives Vol. 2; pp. 55 - 61
• Main Author: Rieder, Stephanie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.06.2016
• Subjects: Biomedicalization; Development; Global health; Medical tourism; Neoliberalism; Postcolonial technoscience; Development; Biomedicalization; Global health; Medical tourism; Neoliberalism; Postcolonial technoscience
• ISSN: 2452-2929; 2452-2929
• DOI: 10.1016/j.wdp.2016.10.004

•Globalization and neoliberalism impact biomedicine and care within global health.•The global health regime assumes particular relationships among people and places.•Global health discourses and practices construct clinical spaces, bodies, and illness.•Global health is productively studied at intersections of transnational networks. Significant challenges face world health and diverse theoretical and methodological approaches have been engaged to both better understand the issues and put forth potential solutions. In the past two decades global health and economic development have become more intricately intertwined. Over the same time the proliferation of the use of the term global health requires interrogation of our assumptions of what is meant by “global health” and how it is constructed as a set of problems and processes. This review of recent developments in the global health literature across sociology, medical anthropology, history, and public health is focused specifically on the interrelationships between global health and globalized neoliberal capitalism. This lens reveals the production of global health as an industry and amalgamation of technologies that allow for new types of medical subjects and objects, as well as movement of patients, professionals, and biologies. Presenting three domains through which neoliberalism and global health intersect, I show that rather than a place or entity, global health exists as a set of complex processes that occur in specific places at the intersections of multiple transnational networks and are best studied within the fraught interactions of human and non-human actors, technologies, and institutions. This may be best accomplished through interdisciplinary work that takes historical and social contexts into account and questions taken-for-granted epistemologies of global health. This brief theoretical grounding of our current scholarship is meant to encourage discussion and promote critical standpoints within the discipline.