School Seminar with Lioba Hirsch, Edinburgh University.
In this talk I draw on my research on/obsession with Connaught Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone’s main adult referral hospital and the site on which it is located have a long history of foreign interests, interventions and imaginations. Studying its pre-, colonial and postcolonial history, allows for an emplaced reading of the field of Global Health; its epistemes, practices and ruination (Stoler, 2013). Through its administration by the Ministry of Health and Sanitation as well as through the presence (some stable, some shifting) of various international NGOs or philanthropic organisations Connaught Hospital, I argue, becomes an example of global health’s reach into a public health institution.
Building on existing works of Stoler, Mol, McKittrick and others, I propose a reading of Connaught Hospital as a place of global health. It is here, I suggest, that global health’s modern and historical dynamics come to the fore, in different, yet no less powerful ways, than in emergency interventions. The reality of global health that emerges here is one of competing interests, short-termism, biomedical domination and unequal power relations. Connaught Hospital, I propose, is a palimpsest of foreign interventions, visible in its buildings, workings and administration. Profoundly global in nature, it is profoundly local in scope, and this disconnect shows up tensions in global and local biomedical governance. Connaught Hospital is the link through which global health intervenes in the lives of Sierra Leonean patients and healthcare staff.
What happens when we tell global health (hi)stories and geographies from this place? What happens when we st(r)ay with one place & its people? What possibilities does such a grammar offer for thinking global health in the past, present & future?