The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a valuable epistemic crucible. It has starkly revealed
how health is deeply entangled with matters of historical inheritances, institutional structures,
societal mores and political norms. The need for frameworks that bring this integrated
understanding of health to the fore has never been more urgent. This research cluster
develops work that abandons disciplinary and technical silos within which health has been
traditionally studied in favor of approaches that foreground how health, ecology, society and
politics are deeply enmeshed and coproduced.
The unfolding of the pandemic in India and China make for especially compelling studies
that illuminate both continuities and the challenges to rationalities that animate the field of
global health. The countries’ responses to the pandemic, in their failures and successes,
reasserted the centrality of national governments in securing the health of populations. This
has unsettled the legitimacy of global health institutions as purveyors of expertise, norms and
biomedical technologies, just as it has troubled precepts of neoliberal globalization with the
breakdown of supply chains and normalization of vaccine nationalism. The research cluster
examines the implications of bringing the state back in, and the stakes in reconfiguring older
North-South hierarchies and histories.
