UNCENSORED CONVERSATIONS: COVID-19 lessons for international partnerships in public health responses
Channel: Decolonial Subversions
Date: 2020-07-14

In this video, Dr. Ifeanyi McWilliams Nsofor, CEO of EpiAFRIC and Director of Policy and Advocacy at Nigeria Health Watch based in Nigeria, and Dr Romina Istratii, co-founder of Decolonial Subversions based at SOAS University of London, explore some of the underlying lessons or implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for international cooperation in addressing public health crises and identify future directions toward a reciprocal or two-way knowledge exchange model between HICs and LMICs or Northern/Southern countries. 

Ifeanyi is a Senior New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute in Washington DC and a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University. He has advocated extensively for universal health care, equity in health education, the need to address health misinformation and other relevant topics, and is a distinguished Thought Leader in Global Health. 

Series background
Prior to the virus outbreak, many in the public and the scholarly community were raising important questions about the negative consequences of capitalism and the neoliberal model, the invasion of personal privacy by high-tech companies siding with governments, and the problem of casualisation in academic institutions. Decolonial and other critical perspectives affirmed, in turn, the ‘situatedness’ of all knowledge production. 

In the aftermath of the outbreak, many of these critical voices have been side-lined; people have become oblivious to the fact that science is susceptible to subjective bias and political/material pressures; high-tech companies and influential capitalists have suddenly become resourceful; and tracking personal characteristics is not only not being problematised but is proposed as part of alleviation strategies. More disconcertingly, the current mainstream narrative depicts itself as progressive and morally superior and anyone who is more critically reflexive or in any way at odds with this narrative risks being monolithically labelled as ‘irrational’, ‘irresponsible’ or ‘selfish.’

This series aims to subvert on-going totalitarian practices and polarisation among the public before it is too late. Relying ideally on a Socratic – dialogical and exploratory – approach we aim to reinvigorate open, frank and uncensored thinking and talk around COVID-19 and its consequences. 

You can read more here: https://www.academia.edu/43160843/UNCENSORED_CONVERSATIONS_Promoting_Open_and_Critical_Discussion_about_COVID-19_and_its_Consequences