STS & Global Health: Special Issue Part I

This issue critically reflects on encounters between STS & Global Health, asking: What is Global Health? What is STS? What happens at their intersections?

If Global Health is traditionally conceputalised within a range of normative positions, the editors ask:

How can a field, grown out of radical epistemological relativism, find common purpose with a field based traditionally on positivist approaches? STS, formed as a Eurocentric endeavour, originated at a time when the current techno-scientific landscape which structures Global Health could not have been imagined. Can and should we reconcile the fact that while STS tells us practices are not general and always situated, Global Health entails the search for generalisability and universally applicable solutions? If so, how?"

Highlighting that earlier reflections and analyses have broadly focused on, first, flows of technology, innovation, knowledge across various scales; second, on resistance to and subversion of Eurocentric science & technology and Northern analytic frameworks; and third, a conceptual shift to non-Western knowledges and practice, the editors argue: 

In this special issue, we wish to move beyond the metaphor of travel, which presumes stable origins and destinations, and instead examine the diffuse and always entangled assemblages that arise when Global Health and STS encounter one another...We contend that not only does such an encounter disrupt the conceptual apparatus of each field, but that substantial work  is required to arrive at a ‘smooth’ narrative...We refrain from taking a stance on what the role of STS should be in and for Global Health; instead, we wish to stimulate reflection on what this encounter can generate in relation to Global Health."

The papers in this issue analyse mundane infrastructures, assumptions, and practices of Global Health that span scales and allow or guide paricular interventions, asking:

Who defines the problem and how it is dealt with? Which disease priorities? Who defines which knowledge counts? How are units of analysis defined?"

The editors further situate the issue within contemporary debates of the "so-called post-truth era" around normativity, reflexivity, and objecitivty, and what it could mean for Global Health interventions, concluding with the following questions which deserve more attention:

 ...how can societies that play little or no part in originating biomedical intervention, including new biotechnologies, nevertheless gain meaningful roles in governing the trajectory of innovation? Secondly, how can a dialogue be forged between health technology designers and users, such that the process of technology and user confi guration is more equitable? Third, how do technology design and development mutually interact with (non-)existing infrastructure? Finally, Global Health might consider the processes that enable, hinder or otherwise affect the traffic in knowledges between interventionists and the users of new biotechnologies such as vaccines and drugs."