Why do women still die when they don’t have to? The world has the tools, means, and a large amount of political will to stop this from happening. Yet for decades we see the repeat of similar patterns. Women doing more of the labour of healthcare. Women taking on greater economic, social, and political burdens as a consequence of major health emergencies. For every advancement in sexual and reproductive health, the threat of backlash. In this seminar, Sophie Harman will map key trends in how women’s health is used and abused for political advantage around the world; and offer a key provocation, that these trends are fundamental to understanding, and even predicting, the chaos and crisis the world finds itself in. Harman will offer a frank reflection of the state of women, gender, and global health in contemporary international relations, and offer a way of confronting these three forces to reclaim the fight for equality in health. Women and women’s health saw it coming.
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About the author
Sophie Harman is Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London where she teaches and conducts research into Global Health Politics, African agency in International Relations, and Visual Politics. She has published seven books and numerous articles on these topics, most recently, Seeing Politics: film, visual method and international relations. In 2016 she co-wrote and produced her first narrative feature film Pili, which was nominated for a BAFTA for outstanding debut for a British writer, producer, or director in 2019. She was the recipient of the Political Studies Association Joni Lovenduski Prize for outstanding achievement by a mid-career scholar and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2018. Her first book for a popular audience on the centrality of women’s health to international politics, Sick of It, will be published by Virago/Little Brown in 2024.