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The movement to decolonise global health is gathering pace. In its concern with the fundamental, distal causes of inequality and its call for social justice, the decolonisation movement forces us to question how global health works, for whom, where it is located, its funding practices, power asymmetries, cultures of collaboration and publication. This paper uses a new book by Harvard-based physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson, Epidemic Illusions , as a point of departure for a broader analysis of the nature of global health knowledge, science, authorship, research and practice. Written in a 'carnivalesque' style, the book proceeds through a series of 'ironic (re)descriptions' to argue that global public health is an 'apparatus of coloniality'. In so doing, the book is generative of four ironic turns that we explore through the themes of guilt, humility, privilege and ambiguity. In locating these ironic turns within the broader landscape of global health, we reflect on whether the means of such a book achieve the ends of decolonisation.

Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared.

The Ebola virus is unparalleled in its charismatic ability to ignite fear, anxiety and disgust at a scale grossly disproportionate to the number of lives it claims. As an archetypal 'Emerging Infectious Disease' (EID), this designation and the politics that have encircled it have provided Ebola with a conceptual space in which epidemiology and geography to splice together in the genesis and maintenance of its charismatic valence. Even before the West African outbreak of 2013-2016, Ebola was an 'exceptional' and 'master status' disease around which media attention mobilised to an unparalleled degree and effect. This paper argues that even if never directly conceptualised as such, Ebola is uniquely charismatic among EIDs and, more, this charisma can be understood geographically. To do so, the paper proceeds in three parts to explore how Ebola's geographic charisma emerges from: (i) it being fixed 'in place' as something innately African; (ii) fears about the virus moving 'out of place' and (iii) its 'potential energy' or the persistent unease generated by the uncertainty of when and where the virus's potential geographies will become actual., (© 2019 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness.)

Global health partnerships (GHPs) are the conceptual cousin of partnerships in the development sphere. Since their emergence in the 1990s, the GHP mode of working and funding has mainly been applied to single-disease, vertical interventions. However, GHPs are increasingly being used to enact Health Systems Strengthening and to address the global health worker shortage. In contrast to other critical explorations of GHPs, we explore in this article how the fact, act, and aspiration of binding different actors together around the ideology and modes of partnership working produces the perpetual state of being in a bind. This is an original analytical framework drawing on research in Sierra Leone and London. We offer new insights into the ways in which GHPs function and are experienced, showing that along with the successes of partnership work, such arrangements are often and unavoidably tense, uncomfortable, and a source of frustration and angst., (© 2018 by the American Anthropological Association.)

Global health partnerships have been hailed as a means of addressing the global health worker shortage, bringing forth health systems strengthening and, therefore, the universal health coverage aspirations of the Sustainable Development Goals. In contrast to other critical engagements with partnerships which have tended to focus on experiences and effects of these partnerships in situ; this paper draws on the example of the UK to explore how partnership working and development agendas have become entwined. Moreover, this entwinement has ensured that GHPs are far from the "global" endeavour that might be expected of global health and instead exhibit geographies that are far more representative of the geopolitics of overseas development assistance than biomedical need., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of political concern in and for countries of the global South. While epidemiologists and public health practitioners and scholars have long expressed concern with the changing global distribution of the burden of NCDs, it is only in more recent years that the aetiology, politics and consequences of these shifts have become an object of critical social scientific enquiry. These shifts mark the starting point for this special issue on 'The Politics of NCDs in the Global South' and act as the basis for new, critical interventions in how we understand NCDs. In this paper, we aim not only to introduce and contextualise the six contributions that form this special issue, but also to identify and explore three themes - problematisation, care and culture - that index the main areas of analytical and empirical concern that have motivated analyses of NCDs in the global South and are central to critical engagement with their political contours., (Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Abdel Omran's epidemiological transition theory has become a convenient heuristic device for explaining shifts in the global distribution of disease. In turn, the temporal and geographic transition from "pandemics of infection" to "degenerative and man-made diseases" (Omran 1971, 161) as countries develop has become part of the mythology of global health. Such myths are powerful not because they are necessarily clearly true or false, but rather for what they naturalize or oversimplify (Essebro 2018). Drawing on the example of the work undertaken over the past three decades to ensure the prioritization of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) as a problem of and for development within global health agendas, I draw on documentary and interview data to examine the origins and residual power of myths. Within this field, geographic myths (see Blaut 2006) about the social, economic, and spatial distribution of morbidity and mortality are a pervasive and persistent challenge for advocates trying to emphasize the threat of NCDs to the Global South. In examining the myth work undertaken by advocates, this article offers novel geographic perspectives to the critical global health field, while also arguing for the centrality of global health to geography as a discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID‐19 is a multi‐spectral crisis that has added an acute layer over a panoply of complex emergencies across the world. In the process, it has not only exposed actually‐existing emergencies, but also exacerbated them as the global gaze has turned inward. As a crisis, COVID‐19 straddles and challenges the boundaries between humanitarianism, development, and global health—the frames and categories through which emergencies are so often understood and intervened upon. Reflection on these fundamental categories is, we argue, an important geographical endeavour. Drawing on Geoffrey Bowker's analytical lens of the 'infrastructural inversion', we explore how humanitarianism has been upended by COVID‐19 along two axes that are of core concern to geographers: (1) the spatial and (2) the temporal. We first contextualise current debates on the humanitarian endeavour and its future within recent geographical research. We then set out the complex structure by which COVID‐19 has been both imagined and intervened upon as a humanitarian emergency. In so doing, we then pave the way for a deeper empirical analysis of the spatial and temporal inversions that have been brought forth by COVID‐19. The paper concludes by examining the conceptual value of the 'inversion' in developing geographical research agendas better attuned to the increasing porosity of humanitarianism, development, and global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been recognised that human health is indelibly shaped by a variety of factors. These include pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, but also broad-ranging social, economic and political forces operating at different spatial scales. In seeking to understand the nature and effects of these forces, two concepts have become particularly influential: the 'social determinants of health' and 'structural violence'. In this paper, we critically examine their origins, tracing their 'prehistory' and little-recognised intersections, based on searches of both concepts in PubMed and Google Scholar, and a critical reading of the range of texts our searches produced. This forms the groundwork from which we examine their similarities and differences, and their potentialities and limitations. We demonstrate that both concepts operate largely as black boxes. Their usage has thus become tied to disciplinary and methodological projects, with attendant implications for their wider usage – especially given the respective statuses of the fields of medical anthropology and social epidemiology in public health. We conclude that structural violence and the social determinants of health have both been influential in research and policy, but have struggled to effect the kinds of political change that their moral commitment to social justice promises and that further dialogue between them is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have long been concerned with the spaces, scales, and conceptual significance of volunteering. They have, however, been slower to engage with the global surge in medical volunteering, whether in times of everyday or acute emergency. Volunteering is a crucial component of the architectures of global health and humanitarianism, but it remains marginal to the concerns of both health and development geographers. This paper seeks to address this lacuna through drawing on the case study of the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. When the outbreak was belatedly declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in 2014, volunteers flowed into Sierra Leone to aid in the response. In drawing on qualitative research with volunteers from a small, Freetown‐based NGO, we aim to close two explicit theoretical gaps. First, we draw out the geographical significance of volunteering during an outbreak of such exceptionality that the modalities, methods and architectures of global health and humanitarianism closed in on one another. Second, we explore how the act and experience of volunteering during the Ebola outbreak helped those involved apprehend what global health might mean and be. In so doing, we also reflect on the instrumental use of humanitarianism within a global health field whose professional contours are often remarkably difficult to navigate. In empirical terms, this intervention is rendered even more significant given the discipline's wider neglect of the Ebola outbreak as a crucial moment where the failures of global health were exposed and the toolkits of humanitarian intervention were pushed to their limits. This paper explores the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone to examine (1) the geographical significance of volunteering during an exceptional outbreak and (2) how the act and experience of volunteering helped those involved apprehend what global health might mean and be. In so doing, we reflect on the instrumental use of humanitarianism within a global health field whose professional contours are often remarkably difficult to navigate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global health volunteering is premised on a comparative understanding of development: hospitals in developing countries are 'behind' modern institutions in developed nations, and sharing volunteers' skills will enable the latter to 'catch-up'. We argue for a 'relational comparison' in development studies, which draws upon a geographical conception of inequality premised on understanding places in relation to one another rather than reifying differences between countries. We place a particular hospital within a dialectical totality of combined and uneven development. Health workers' experiences of volunteering in Sierra Leone demonstrate that local problems, including staff shortages and corruption, are enveloped within global processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of global health as a field of study and site of intervention has animated significant critical social science engagements. Of these, medical anthropology has arguably emerged as the ascendant in the field with its growing corpus of writing and advocacy largely animated by the discipline's 'suffering slot'. This paper thus applies a geographical critique to anthropology's moral, humanitarian impulse to give voice to suffering by exploring the spatial consequences of this mode of scholarship. It argues that the suffering slot inevitably leads global health researchers to certain archetypal spaces and that, in turn, these places: (i) are overwhelmingly biomedical; (ii) come to function as 'truth spots' in the production and circulation of global health knowledge and (iii) perpetuate a global health riddled with 'ignorance spots'. Given this, the paper asks what happens if we look beyond suffering to consider the hidden geographies of global health that might then be revealed. It argues that in order to develop a richer topography of global health knowledge and critique, we must also consider those spaces where pleasure and suffering intersect in ways that challenge the humanitarian impulse and crisis-led readings of health. These other archetypal spaces of global health - gyms, bars, supermarkets and more - are not flippant distractions from the grave reality of human suffering, but rather spaces that condition the genesis of suffering and where affliction is put aside in favour of pleasure. In arguing that we need to be far more attuned to the non-medical spaces where global health is produced, experienced and challenged, the paper also articulates how geography might productively meet anthropology in critical studies of global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health geography has emerged from under the "shadow of the medical" to become one of the most vibrant of all the subdisciplines. Yet, this success has also meant that health research has become increasingly siloed within this subdisciplinary domain. As this article explores, this represents a potential lost opportunity with regard to the study of global health, which has instead come to be dominated by anthropology and political science. Chief among the former's concerns are exploring the gap between the programmatic intentions of global health and the unintended or unanticipated consequences of their deployment. This article asserts that recent work on contingency within geography offers significant conceptual potential for examining this gap. It therefore uses the example of alcohol taxation in Botswana, an emergent global health target and tool, to explore how geographical contingency and the emergent, contingent geographies that result might help counter the prevailing tendency for geography to be sidestepped within critical studies of global health. At the very least, then, this intervention aims to encourage reflection by geographers on how to make explicit the all-too-often implicit links between their research and global health debates located outside the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary complements and extends Brown and Moon's (2012) work on 'geography and global health' by starting where their piece finished - the post-2015 development agenda. It explores three core elements of this agenda: the debate over the revised Millennium Development Goals, new Sustainable Development Goals and the inclusion of non-communicable disease within both. It then critically reflects on the significance of this for three areas of geographical engagements with global health in particular, and health in more general terms: the (re)integration of health and the urban; shifts in global funding priorities; and the genesis and effects of what have been termed 'industrial epidemics'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) across the world is known, but concrete action is lacking. • Covid-19 has made the risks of and vulnerabilities from NCDs more visible. • The future of the global NCD agenda is uncertain, but needs to be included in pandemic preparedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decolonisation agenda is gathering momentum in global health. Within this movement, one domain of analysis has been the ways in which the geographies of scholarly knowledge production (re)produce the inequities of coloniality. Drawing on the example of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), here we deviate from this and instead examine the authorship of the key global documents that were used to ignite and mobilise the NCD advocacy agenda from 2000 to 2020. In doing so, we reflect on the changing ecosystems of authorial expertise. It shows that while the geographic distribution of expertise has broadened over time, the NCD domain remains a fairly tight and circumscribed network. Importantly this research also shows the complexities of ascribing location to expertise, a finding that speaks back to the decolonisation debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]