Global Health Justice Initiative

Our approach to global health: Partnering to dismantle Global North-Global South inequity

Our distinct approach to research and advocacy reflects our deep understanding of the power embedded in existing global and institutional governance systems and the changes required in the laws, policies, norms, and practices that constitute those systems. As researchers, activists, and practitioners based in a U.S. academic institution, we see our role as interrogating the ways law, policy, finance, coloniality, governance, and accountability frameworks originating in the Global North institutions promote or undermine justice in the U.S. and globally. Our research priorities are informed by our partnerships with activists and organizations led by and working with people from structurally excluded populations in the U.S. and the Global South. These include Black, immigrant, Indigenous people, and women from communities of color. We focus on the most marginalized, people with disabilities, adolescents, and LGBTQI populations. We seek to reflect on and amplify their voices in our teaching, research, and advocacy, as well as in our publications, convenings, and technical assistance. We consider our partners to be leaders. For example, in our new role as a host to the Global 16 Days Campaign against Gender-based Violence, activists around the world are working with us to develop messaging and advocacy materials that they can adapt to their specific needs as they confront the dramatic increase in restrictions on bodily autonomy.

Learning and collaborating

We understand that the U.S. has much to learn from the world. Some examples from CUNY SPH illustrate this approach:

• Fostering learning and exchange among migrant-serving organizations in New York State and their counterparts in other countries.
• Understanding how gender identity affects access to health in vulnerable populations locally and across the world.
• Exploring how community-informed mental health interventions for economically disadvantaged women in Vietnam can inform similar efforts in Harlem and around the world.
• Organizing forums with local partners for public health professionals, food justice activists, and academics in Cape Town, New York, and London to develop new frameworks for reducing child obesity and its inequitable distribution in these three cities.
• Learning from medical providers and activists who have successfully overturned abortion bans in Colombia, Ireland, Sierra Leone, and Benin on strategy and the successful use of science.

Diverse experiences that foster innovation and impact

CUNY SPH brings several unique assets to our global health work. First, our students will play a critical role in these partnerships, with many coming from and maintaining ties with structurally excluded populations and communities. More than two thirds of our students identify as Indigenous, Asian, Black, or Hispanic, and almost a third are foreign born, with a quarter having a non-English native language. More than a third are first generation of their families to attend college, and 70 percent work full-time, making them deeply familiar with intersecting systems of oppression. We strive to equip them with the knowledge, skills, and experiences to thrive as public health leaders driving change from within systems, institutions, and communities.

Second, CUNY SPH is part of the nation’s largest and most diverse urban public university. CUNY’s 225,000 students, 7,000 full-time faculty members and 11,300 part-time faculty members include members of many of the world’s diasporas. Its faculties and academic departments include key disciplines that constitute the intellectual foundations of global health: political economy, human rights law, ethnic and area studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and multiple health disciplines. Bringing together faculty and students from this rich tapestry of disciplines and demographics will enable our program to create 21^st century approaches to scholarship and practice.

Third, the current CUNY SPH faculty members bring their own expertise, networks, and research and advocacy experience. Faculty members currently work in Vietnam, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Lebanon, Spain, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and other countries, providing multiple insights into practices, policy and reach into the Global North, the Global South and across this divide. Its content expertise in human rights law, AIDS, chronic diseases, food insecurity and hunger, sexual and reproductive health and justice, mental health and drug use, commercial determinants of health, and other topics provides an intellectual foundation for interdisciplinary studies of the most challenging public health problems of the 21^st century.

Finally, CUNY is embedded in New York City, a global city that has been the epicenter of many recent global health crises, the incubator for innovation to solve problems that affect the growing world population living in cities, and a center for international capital, the media, and activism. By leveraging our connections with the New York City government, locally based international organizations, media, and philanthropy we can have an impact beyond our own capacities.

CUNY SPH’s unique approach to research, advocacy, and teaching related to global health rests on the following five key pillars:

• our deep understanding of power structures within existing global and institutional governance systems, and the changes required in laws, policies, norms, and practices that constitute those systems;
• our partnerships with activists and organizations led by and working with people from structurally excluded communities;
• our understanding that the US is part of the larger world as we draw on global experiences to inform work in our own neighborhood;
• our positioning as a large, public, urban university in a city through which a quarter of US asylum seekers transit annually;
• our diverse student population;
• our convening power to foster multidisciplinary collaborations
• our understanding that social movements are critical to health justice