The W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics and UBC Centre for India and South Asian Research (CISAR) are pleased co-sponsor a talk by Kiran Kumbhar, Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Centre for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. Join them on Friday, February 7, 2025, from 9-10:30AM in-person at the School of Population and Public Health (B104, 2206 East Mall) or via Zoom (registration required, details below).
Title: Medicine, Colonialism, and Historical Complexity.
Abstract: Over the past few centuries, European colonization of different parts of the world gradually changed the ways in which people everywhere theorized and practiced healthcare. These changes took place in the brutal context of vast power asymmetries between Europeans and native communities. However, despite the overwhelming presence of colonial power in their midst, native people often exercised agency in the domains of medicine and healthcare, and through that agency they were as likely to accommodate and embrace as to resist the medical ideas that came via colonial authority. The colonizer-colonized power asymmetry was the one constant in an otherwise fluid world of medicine, where colonial officers sometimes sought help from “indigenous medicine” physicians and colonized people often sought care from “Western medicine” clinics and hospitals. Based on well-known and lesser-known research from the literature on colonialism and medicine in South Asia — one of the most extensively researched regions in this field — as well as on insights from teaching these topics to undergraduate and graduate students, this presentation will offer a survey of the complexity that pervades the history of medicine and colonialism, and then discuss what this complexity means for our current efforts to decolonize global health.
Bio: Kiran Kumbhar is a historian, health policy expert, and public communicator with a background in medical and public health practice. He is currently affiliated with the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.
Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/PTVSpkiRRyadw-ELTowZAw