Learning to Save the World: Global Health Pedagogies and Moral Transformation in Botswana

A Kellogg Work-in-Progress Seminar with Visiting Fellow Betsey Behr Brada.

Brada argues that global health is not a set of institutional arrangements or moral commitments, but an imaginative framework that organizes the space, time, and ethics of encounter. She traces the pedagogic practices through which global health emerged at the intersection of Botswana’s public HIV treatment program and private US-based institutions, focusing on patient education and bedside teaching and linking these to broader changes in biomedical training and humanitarianism. She argues that global health’s coherence depends on visiting experts and their local counterparts, patients, and their families shaping themselves and one another in terms of this framework. In short, global health’s subjects must learn to both inhabit and maintain it by distinguishing global from local, expert from inexpert, and the present from the past.