Speakers
James Pfeiffer
"NGOs, Austerity, and Universal Health Coverage in Mozambique"
James Pfeiffer PhD, MPH is Professor in the Department of Global health in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, Seattle, with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Pfeiffer is also Executive Director of Health Alliance International (HAI) and oversees public sector health system strengthening projects in Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, and Timor Leste. Dr. Pfeiffer earned his PhD in Anthropology and his MPH at the University of California, Los Angeles.
He has 25 years of research experience in medical anthropology and public health in Africa. He has worked extensively HIV/AIDS, reproductive health and community health projects in Mozambique and has coordinated numerous program evaluations and implementation science projects for Health Alliance International (HAI), a non-profit based in Seattle that is also a program Center in the Department of Global Health at UW.
In his faculty positions at Case Western Reserve University and University of Washington, Dr. Pfeiffer has served as principal investigator on medical anthropology and public health research funded by the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and National Institutes of Health.
Nora Kenworthy
"Crowdfunding and corporate landscapes of health coverage: the political implications of new “charitable” financing platforms"
Nora Kenworthy is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research explores the politics of global health governance, the sociopolitical impacts of HIV initiatives in southern Africa, and the changing roles of corporations in shaping health policy in the US and abroad.
Kenworthy is the author of Mistreated: The Political Consequences of the Fight Against AIDS in Lesotho (2017, Vanderbilt University Press), which won Vanderbilt’s Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize. She is co-editor of the books Case Studies in Corporations and Global Health Governance: Impacts, Influence, and Accountability (2016, Rowman & Littlefield) and HIV Scale-up and the Politics of Global Health (2015, Routledge). Her work has been published in Social Science and Medicine, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Global Public Health, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.
Nora’s more recent research looks at the ethics and implications of the use of crowdfunding to cover essential healthcare costs in the US and globally. She holds a PhD in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University.
Susan Erikson
"Speculative Health Futures: How Bond Financing is Reshaping Health Services Worldwide"
Dr. Susan Erikson is a medical anthropologist who has worked in Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and North America. During a first international affairs career, she worked for or with government departments and agencies on issues of international development, foreign policy, and trade. As an academic, she combines this practical professional experience with a critical study of the relations of power informing global health scenarios. She studies technologies of global health, both their hardware (like smart phones and ultrasound machines) and their software (like numerical health indicators, big data algorithms, financing models, and policy). She has been following the business of global health since 2010 and won the Society for Medical Anthropology's (SMA) Virchow Prize in 2013 for her Medical Anthropology publication on global health business.
Dr. Erikson is the founding director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. In 2007, she joined the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Her research has been funded by Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the Wenner-Gren Foundation and others. Global health data and financialization are current research foci.
Manjari Mahajan
"Rethinking Accountability: Philanthropic Foundations and their Publics"
Manjari Mahajan is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University, New York. Her work lies at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, Development Studies, and Anthropology. Her research focuses on the politics of expertise in global health.
Mahajan has a forthcoming book titled “Constituting Global Health: Expertise and Emergency in the AIDS Epidemics of India and South Africa.” Her next book is on how global health agendas are being shaped by philanthropic organizations. The book focuses on the Gates Foundation and the influence it exerts in global health not only through its financial clout but also through shaping knowledge platforms. She has a new research project on the ecologies and politics of data production for development and health.
Katerini Storeng
"Civil Society Participation in Global Public-Private Partnerships for Health"
Katerini Storeng is Associate Professor at the Centre for Development and Environment. Her research spans the interface of medical anthropology and global public health, and examines the social and political dynamics global health policy and practice. She has studied evidence production and policy development within public-private partnerships including Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Partnership for Maternal Newborn and Child Health. She is also interested in the transfer of policies between global, national and local levels, in particular donor and international NGOs' influence.
Her current research interests include civil society engagement in global health governance processes, within the context of ongoing policy debates about health systems strengthening, universal health coverage and global health security.
Before joining the University of Oslo as a postdoc in 2010, she was research fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She has a PhD from the University of London (LSHTM) (2010), an MSc in Medical Anthropology from University College London (2002) and a BA in Psychology and Social Studies of Medicine from McGill University (2001).