Alicia Yamin will speak about her recent book, When Misfortune Becomes Injustice, which surveys the progress and challenges in deploying human rights to advance health and social equality over recent decades. Weaving together theory and firsthand experience in a compelling narrative of how evolving legal norms, empirical knowledge, and development paradigms have interacted in the realization of health rights, Yamin challenges us to consider why these advances have failed to produce greater equality within and between nations. In this revised and expanded second edition, Yamin incorporates crucial lessons learned about the state of global health equity and public health systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating just how incompatible the current institutionalized world order—based on neoliberal, financialized capitalism—is with one in which the rights of diverse people around the globe can be realized. Yamin argues that transformative human rights praxis in health calls for addressing issues of structural inequality and political economy, and working across disciplinary silos through networks and social movements.
Collective member, Sakiko Fukuda Parr wrote the foreword for the book.
About the Speaker
Alicia Ely Yamin currently teaches law and public health at Harvard University. She has over thirty years of experience in human rights practice, living and working with advocacy organizations across the globe.
About this seminar series
The Collective Conversations is a seminar series organised by the Collective for the Political Determinants of Health. It aims to bring an original and critical lens to global health debates by discussing how the political determinants shape health outcomes.
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