Global Health Justice: Methodologies for Epistemic Reparation
The Philosophy Department at George Mason University is hosting the Spring Symposium of the Independent Resource Group for Global Health Justice (IRG-GHJ), to be held online on April 14th, 2023 at 9:00AM until 6:00PM EST (Fairfax, Virginia, USA). The event will not be recorded.
Increasing attention is being given to ways imperialism/colonialism has silenced and suppressed the knowledge of countless peoples, including distorting the fields of inquiry and practice informing global health governance, policy and practice, and continues to perpetuate injustices. This one-day conference is dedicated to methodologies for making reparations, and in particular, epistemic reparations needed for realizing more global health justice. We are bringing together scholars, practitioners, and artists to help address such questions as:
What specific methodologies can we use in pursuing greater global health equity/justice that identify and integrate knowledge resources that may be less visible, or have been damaged or diminished due to historical and current injustice?
How can the historically silenced or erased and the powerful use and be critical of long-accepted methods in fields like epidemiology, economics, international relations, and philosophy that were generated and developed in a context of social and global injustice?
How can there be greater access to and awareness of the value of information from community-based knowledge products which don’t surface in English or rich country academic databases and literature searches?
How can we enable knowledge production and voice for aid recipients in humanitarian responses?
How might migrants identify and address the conditions that threaten their health?
What are the potential pitfalls of proposed methodologies?
Why might this endeavor fail and how can this be avoided?
14 April, 2023
9:00am - 6:00pm EST
( 2:00pm - 11:00pm UK / BST )
Schedule:
9:00-9:15 am
George Mason University Land Acknowledgement
Introductions, Lisa Eckenwiler (Department of Philosophy, George Mason University)
9:15-10:15 am
Chair, Sridhar Venkatapuram (Global Health Institute, King’s College London)
Keynote 1: Melanie Altanian (School of Philosophy, University College Dublin), Denialism and the Failure of Restorative Epistemic Reparation
10:30-12:00 pm
Chair, Anna C. Zielinska (Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France)
Panel A: Gabriela Arguedas-Ramírez (Escuela de Filosofía, Universidad de Costa Rica); Ryoa Chung, (Département de Philosophie, Université de Montréal); Tereza Hendl (University of Augsburg), Epistemic Justice, Reparations and Global Health
12:15-1:30 pm
Chair, Shannon Fyfe (Department of Philosophy, George Mason University)
Keynote 2: Himani Bhakuni (York Law School), The Legal Case for Epistemic Reparations in Global Health
Lunch (if attending in person, bring your own lunch)
1:45-2:45 pm
Chair, Sahar Akhtar (Georgetown University)
Keynote 3: Jo Vearey (African Centre for Migration & Society, Wits University), Epistemic Reparations in the Field of Migration and Health Research: Who Benefits?
3:00-4:15 pm
Chair, Lisa Eckenwiler (Department of Philosophy, George Mason University)
Panel B: Layla Chergui (Montréal, QC), Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, (Berlin, Germany), Aya Haidar (London, UK), How Significant is the Role of Art and Design in Epistemic Reparations?
4:30-5:30 pm
Chair, Ndidi Nwaneri, (Department of Philosophy, Loyola University, Chicago)
Keynote 4: Ayesha Ahmad (Global Health Humanities, St George's University of London), (Re)finding Solace: Beyond the Solastalgia of Homelands of Exile, War, and Land Trauma,
5:30-5:45 pm
Closing Remarks, Seye Abimbola, (School of Public Health, University of Sydney)
Meet our speakers!
Melanie Altanian
Melanie Altanian is currently a research assistant at University College Dublin, School of Philosophy, as part of the Horizon 2020 project “PERITIA - Policy, Expertise and Trust in Action.” She received her Ph.D. from the University of Bern and since 2015 has been working and publishing on issues related to epistemic injustice, ignorance and genocide denialism. Altanian is bringing together ethical, epistemological and socio-political philosophical concerns and offering a critical normative contribution to the fields of historical and transitional justice and genocide studies. She recently submitted her book “The Epistemic Injustice of Genocide Denialism” (under contract with Routledge) for review. Her most recent publication, “Rethinking the right to know and the case for restorative epistemic reparation,” appeared in the Journal of Social Philosophy.
Gabriela Arguedas-Ramírez
Gabriela Arguedas-Ramírez is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women`s Studies at the Universidad de Costa Rica, where she teaches Bioethics and Feminist Topics. In 2015 she presented her research results on obstetric violence in Costa Rica, in a thematic audience for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. As a result of her research on obstetric violence, gender and human rights, she created the Reproductive Rights Observatory at the CIEM (Women's Studies Research Center) University of Costa Rica. She has published articles about the ethics of human genome editing, obstetric power/violence, ecofeminism, religious fundamentalism and global health justice. Her more recent book is a Spanish translation of Dr. Steven Miles’s Doctors Who Torture: The Pursue of Justice (Universidad de Costa Rica Press, 2022).
Ryoa Chung
Ryoa Chung is Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Montreal and co-Director of the Center for Research in Ethics. She works in the field of international ethics, feminist philosophy, political philosophy and health inequality. She also teaches medical ethics/bioethics at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montreal. Her works have appeared in edited volumes published by Oxford University Press, Presses universitaires de France, and in journals such as Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics, Public health Ethics, The Lancet, Hastings Center Report.
Tereza Hendl
Tereza Hendl is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Augsburg and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research spans across moral and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and normative and public health ethics. She investigates concerns of refusal, justice, vulnerability, empowerment and solidarity and the ethics and epistemology of health technologies and interventions. She is the founder of the CEE Feminist Research Network, which supports feminist researchers from Central and Eastern Europe, counters the epistemic marginalisation of CEE scholarship in knowledge production and amplifies anticolonial critiques from CEE standpoints.
Himani Bhakuni
Himani Bhakuni is a Lecturer at York Law School, University of York. Her research areas include Human Rights, Health Law, Bioethics, Global Health, and Global Justice.
Jo Vearey
Jo Vearey (she/her) has a background in public health and her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections between migration and health. She is an Associate Professor and Director of the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at Wits University in Johannesburg where she coordinates the Migration and Health Project Southern Africa (maHp). Jo is an Honorary Researcher at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh, directs the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) Centre of Excellence in Migration and Mobility – hosted by the ACMS, and is Vice-Chair of the global Migration, Health, and Development Research Initiative (MHADRI). With a commitment to social justice, Jo’s research explores ways to generate and communicate knowledge to improve responses to migration, health and wellbeing. Fundamental to her research practice is participation in policy processes at international and local levels, including exploration of approaches to address epistemic injustice in the development of appropriate policy responses. This includes participation in a range of WHO processes, including leading the AFRO regional evidence review for the WHO’s first global migration and health report, participation in the development of WHO’s global research agenda on migration and health, and providing technical advice to the WHO’s Refugee and Migrant Health Competency Standards for Healthcare Workers.
Layla Chergui
Layla Chergui is an industrial designer from Montreal. She trained at the College of Art and Design in Toronto. Chergui chose to be a designer after growing up in a highly artistic environment. Her dad is an artist whose practice revolves around art as therapy and repair of the soul after living through multiple wars. She is participating in this talk to bring about her knowledge on the subject of epistemic reparation through the lens of artists and designers.
Silvina Der-Meguerditchian
Silvina Der-Meguerditchian is a multimedia artist born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and living and working in Berlin, Germany. Her work explores themes of belonging, the role of minorities in society, and the potential of an "in-between" space. Memory and working with archives are the focus of her artistic exploration. She is the artistic director of the Houshamadyan project, a multimedia memory book for Armenian Ottoman history. The artist was a fellow at the Tarabya Academy of Culture in 2014/15. In the summer of 2015, she participated in Armenity, the Armenian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, which was awarded the Golden Lion for the best national representation. Since 2014, she has worked with "Women mobilizing memory," a group of artists, writers, social activists, and memory scholars working internationally. In 2020, her film "The Wishing Tree" was awarded with a Special Mention at the Sharjah Film Platform. 2022 She was awarded with the Falkenrot Preis, the 2022 visual arts work stipend of the Berlin Senate and the "In view" grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal. She is currently participating at the exhibition "Realities left vacant" at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (N.B.K.) and "Exceptional lives, Greek Armenians’ Testimonies of the Armenian Genocide, Nazi Atrocities, and Survival" at the August Bebel Institute in Berlin.
Aya Haidar
Aya Haidar is is an artist who investigates the limitations of a visual language within fine art, which leads her to explore the fundamental elements of language that contributes to a story. This overlap plays on one’s senses of memory and imagination. Haidar places herself at the centre of the work, both physically as the object and emotionally as the subject. Her current work focuses on the recycling of found and disposable objects making poetic works that explore labour, displacement, domesticity, womanhood and memory, with a particular focus on the Middle East through the histories contained within aged, and culturally specific objects. She further develops this aspect of re-using objects to re-create narratives, to explore memory with a focus on older objects from previous generations. This idea of the development of a generational craft work that spans time, at once explores hand me down skills, stories and community, and by extension, cultural specificity and intercultural nature of British society. Her focus on on developing inter-cultural dialogues is a vital step in the support of offering alternative ways to see the world, and initiate debate about the globalized world we live in. She sees her work contributing to dialogues around global cultures, media and questions of identity, both national and personal.
Ayesha Ahmad
Dr. Ahmad holds a PhD in medical ethics and works to integrate ethics and the humanities into global health research and pedagogy. Her research expertise is in transcultural psychiatry and cross-cultural mental health. She particularly work in contexts of conflict and humanitarian crisis resulting from disasters including environmental change. Dr. Ahmad's specialisation is in psychological trauma and the ethical consequences of concepts that are used in mental health. She has developed both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in culture and mental health. In her work, Dr. Ahmad critically explores the notion of land trauma, as it is juxtaposed with a medicalised and biomedical paradigm of a temporal understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. At St George’s University of London, Dr. Ahmad has established as Global Health Humanities Hub to bring together scholars and students using humanities-based methodologies to approach and respond to global health inequities and injustice. Dr. Ahmad also works as an Expert Witness providing academic reports on asylum seeker cases related to war, mental health, and gender-based violence.
Seye Abimbola
Seye Abimbola is an associate professor of health systems in the University of Sydney’s School of Health. In addition to his teaching, serves as a research fellow at the National Primary Health Care Development Agency and an Honorary Fellow in Health Systems Science at The George Institute for Global Health in Australia. Abimbola currently sits as Prince Claus Chair on Justice in Global Health Research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Editor in Chief for BMJ Global Health.
Meet the chairs!
Sridhar Venkatapuram
IRG Chair
Associate Professor of Global Health & Philosophy
King’s College
Anna C. Zielinska
IRG Member
Associate Professor in Moral, Legal and Political Philosophy
University of Lorraine, Nancy, France
Shannon Fyfe
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
George Mason University
Sahar Akhtar
Visiting Professor
Georgetown University
Ndidi Nwaneri
Visiting Scholar
Loyola University, Chicago
Hosted by
Lisa Eckenwiler
Lisa Eckenwiler, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at George Mason University, where she teaches courses in bioethics and a range of topics in global health ethics. Her research centers broadly on vulnerability and structural health injustice, with special interests in migration, humanitarian health ethics, and placemaking. She is at work on a book entitled Placemaking for Health Justice, for Routledge, and lead editor for Forced Migration and Health Justice, for Oxford University Press. Her previous books include Long-term Care, Globalization and Justice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and The Ethics of Bioethics: Mapping the Moral Landscape, co-edited with Felicia Cohn (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Her research collaborations are currently focused on the ethics of closing humanitarian projects; the ethics of humanitarian accommodations; and the integration of refugees and other migrants in destination countries. Professor Eckenwiler is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, and recently served as Vice President of the International Association of Bioethics. She is also founder and current chair of the Migrant Health and Ethics Network (within the International Association of Bioethics) and a founding member of the Independent Resource Group for Global Health Justice.
In addition to the Conference Advisory Council
Allie Edwards, Graduate Student of Philosophy, George Mason University
Carly Chier, Student of Philosophy, George Mason University
Austin Hardee, Graduate Student of Philosophy, George Mason University
Alexandra Efron, Graduate Student of Philosophy, George Mason University