Global Health and the Social Sciences: Symbolic Struggle and the Academic Field

• In Event: 1549 - The Rhetoric of Development

Abstract

Global health is a domain marked by material and symbolic struggle. Whose knowledge, theories, explanations, and data become legitimate and socially powerful? This paper responds to a series of interesting puzzles that emerged following an event held at Boston University called the “Symposium on Global Health and the Social Sciences” on November 9th and 10th, 2017. The Symposium gathered more than 30 leading political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists to discuss a simple premise: Why isn’t there a greater focus on global health within the core social science disciplines?

In this paper I historicize the social scientific disciplinary boundaries between sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics. Then, I use citation network analysis and bibliometrics to trace the concrete domains of citation relationships within the social science of global health literature to demonstrate the relative degree of epistemic closure and boundary work between the social science disciplines. I compare the citation network analysis findings to the content and points raised in the conversations held during the Symposium on Global Health and the Social Sciences to make claims about the relational and institutional processes that have produced the fractured academic field of global health knowledge. Drawing on these empirical findings, along with the practice-based theories of Bourdieu, Burawoy, and Latour, I hope to comment on the sources of academic struggle that tend to fracture the field of global health research and what might be done to reassemble it into something more productive.

Author

• Jonathan David Shaffer, Boston University