Antiblackness and Global Health: An evening with Dr Lioba Hirsch

As the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed, health inequalities around the world disproportionately affect people of African descent. Dr Lioba Hirsch offers a radical perspective on the racial politics of global health.

Hirsch traces the legacies of colonialism across the landscape of global health in Sierra Leone, showing how this history underpinned the international response to Ebola.

Her book Antiblackness and Global Health offers a major new account of the 2014-2016 West African Ebola crisis, moving from the material and atmospheric traces of colonialism and enslavement in Freetown, to the forms of knowledge presented in colonial archives and in contemporary expert accounts, to disease control and care practices.

Hirsch aims to equip critical scholars, medical and humanitarian practitioners, policy makers and health activists with the tools and knowledge to challenge antiblackness in global health practice and politics. The book argues that Black Studies can inform future research on medical interventions in Africa by unpacking postcolonial silences, centring Black perspectives and highlighting the endurance of colonial infrastructures in the present.

Join us to celebrate the publication of this vital new book from a local scholar.

Our Speaker:

Dr Lioba Hirsch is a Wellcome Research Fellow and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She began her career as an international development practitioner in Zambia before completing a PhD in Geography and Global Health at University College London. Hirsch has published articles and essays on the need for a Black Studies approach to global health. Her writing has appeared in The Lancet, Area, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Health & Place.