The evolution of global health research planning (1974 to the present)

George Weisz, 20219-2020 Paris IAS Fellow, presents his research project The Evolution of Global Health Research (1974 to present) at the weekly internal web seminar.
The presentation will be discussed by David Reubi, Senior Lecturer in Global Health at King's College London.

Global Health (GH)has in the past two decades become a growth enterprise, with a good proportion of its resources spent on various forms of knowledge production. In this talk, I will try to define and describe this field, as well as my approach to it, and to examine the history of efforts to expand and co-ordinate research of all sorts, considered an indispensable component of any effort to improve health worldwide. Knowledge production and its uses were shaped by a wider split between dominant bio-technological approaches to disease-specific problems, on one hand, and a small but growing field devoted to developing health system infrastructure and human resources, based on social science methodologies. Underlying this division was a more basic distinction, one that connects GH knowledge to the broader history of medical science, between reductionist and holistic strategies of research and knowledge application.