Health Humanities of the Global South

Global health has long paid insufficient attention to the epistemological, cultural, and political conditions that shape health, illness, and care. This pathbreaking interdisciplinary collection of perspectives argues that the humanities are indispensable to global health. They are not supplements to clinical and public health knowledge but represent and structure how the conditions through which suffering becomes legible, healing becomes possible, and justice becomes imaginable, work in specific contexts. Drawing together scholars, educators, clinicians, and practitioners from Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and beyond, Global Health Humanities: Perspectives, Debates and Practices assumes the Global South as a generator of knowledge, rather than a site for its application. Contributors engage Ubuntu philosophy, Indigenous and land-based healing, decolonial planetary health, postcolonial medical education, narrative and embodied methodologies, and literary representations of infertility, cancer, mental illness, and trauma. Together, they reveal how silence, stigma, language, land, and power shape the lived experience of health in ways that technocratic frameworks alone cannot address, and may indeed cause harm. The volume refuses simple solutions. It insists on multiple perspectives, sustains genuine debate, and models what decolonial health humanities looks like in practice — in curricula, in clinical encounters, in community partnerships, and in ecological relation. It challenges the assumption that health knowledge flows in any single direction. The authors ask what global health could become, if it were willing to be transformed by the worlds it encounters. Essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners across medicine, public/global health, literature, history, and the social sciences, this book redefines what it means to take both ‘global’ and ‘human’ seriously in health. How do we begin to imagine the relations between the global and the human and the harms colonialism continues to inflict?