Global health is about equity and justice. We believe that global health institutions must fight, not reinforce, racial and national hierarchies and exploitative systems.
Decolonising Global Health LSHTM (DGH-LSHTM) is a community of students, staff and alumni working in a voluntary capacity, working to challenge the status quo in global health research, teaching and careers at LSHTM and in the countries where we live and work.
Challenges we seek to address
- Action for race equality and decolonisation is needed because racial and national hierarchies exist in our daily lives, our institutions and society at large.
- Colonial legacies shape the geopolitics of global health and work their way into programme and research design, implementation and monitoring. They also impact on career progression and student awards and shape global health as a political and scientific field.
- LSHTM has played a part in establishing and maintaining global health as a (post)colonial field. The institution continues to benefit from and contribute to its colonial character.
- Students and staff who identify and are identified as white or from higher-income countries enjoy a position of relative and typically unspoken privilege over students and staff from the global majority.
- Prejudice needs to be addressed both in people who are well meaning while still holding unconscious bias and in people who overtly believe that certain racial/ethnic groups are inferior.
- While it is important for people affected by these issues to have a voice, racist and colonial attitudes and structural barriers must be fought by everyone. We should not put undue responsibility on affected groups.
- While committed to making our learning and work spaces more equitable and decentring western perspectives, we see decolonisation as ultimately inseparable with the material justice.
What is DGH doing?
DGH-LSHTM focus on the following:
- Creating spaces for reflection on the role of decolonial approaches to teaching, learning and research
- Engaging senior leadership to make teaching, research and careers in global health more equitable
- Establishing collaborations with other justice-oriented organisations
Selected past actions and events we have organised:
In 2019, DGH compiled and sent a summary of suggested actions to senior leadership to address racial inequality at LSHTM and in global health.
A summary of our work in 2020 and personal reflections on DGH at LSHTM are available in the December 2020 newsletter.
A presentation on DGH-LSHTM is available in the February 2021 open meeting video.
Watch Decolonising disability justice event with Dr Oche Onazi, an author of An African Path to Disability Justice: Community, Relationships and Obligations who discussed the concepts of disability in the light of African ethics in his first book-length exploration of disability justice from an African perspective.
Watch Dr Shona Hunter discuss her work in the field of Critical Studies of Whiteness which investigates how whiteness sustains the current global intersecting systems of marginalisation and exclusion. Dr Hunter unpacks how whiteness is established and enacted through a range of normalised [and normalising] cultural and institutional practices.
How to get involved with DGH
DGH-LSHTM is a volunteer community of students, staff and alumni working to address the prevalence and perpetuation of colonial power dynamics in global health. We work independently and are not an extension of any faculties, departments, centres or committees.
We are always looking for new volunteers to join our group. You do not need expert knowledge of anti-racism and decolonising, to forward new ideas, or support DGH-LSHTM in being more effective at constructive activism at this critical time.
Any staff, student or alumni at LSHTM, MRC Units in The Gambia or Uganda interested in contributing to our work, please email us at decolonising@lshtm.ac.uk.
Further information
If you would like to be kept up to date on news and events from DGH-LSHTM, please subscribe to the mailing list and please get in touch:
- Email: decolonising@lshtm.ac.uk.