The short presentations (10 minutes each) in this roundtable will engage with a new emerging concept of the “global” in “global health” as a contested moral and epistemic terrain, one that upends more familiar epistemic divides and categories. Attempts to expand what counts as health, who counts as an expert, and how concepts of healing and well-being have emerged from—and been constrained by—racial, environmental, and economic hierarchies over time reflect this more capacious understanding of the “global” in histories of medicine. Moreover, rather than see “global health” as a system of governance, marked by interaction between a center and periphery, the presentations here highlight a messier and richer field that is increasingly interested in the silences and asymmetries of globalization, and the emergence of political geographies in health across the Global South that may bypass EuroAmerica entirely.

The roundtable, one aimed at opening a dialogue among panelists and the audience, proposes that, to remain a relevant site of inquiry, the multi-sited, multilingual, and interdisciplinary nature of the global needs to, paradoxically, engage more seriously with questions of scale. In particular, we are interested in the global, not as studied under a single encompassing register or as a universal process. Instead, we see it as a mosaic of interlocking geographies, including borderlands and port cities, oceanic worlds, urban spaces, and hinterlands—each offering a distinctive vantage point on the making of health and disease. Similarly, we are interested in imagining “health” in more expansive terms, as a field of values, practices, and politics in which multiple forms of expertise, including local and embodied knowledges, coexist. Panelists will draw on examples from their own research sites and reflect on the methodological challenges of identifying and interpreting archival material that inverts inherited hierarchies of expertise and voice. By foregrounding local and embodied knowledges, Indigenous and community health traditions, and the environmental contexts that sustain them, the presentations here continue to question whose knowledge travels, where, whose health is protected, and how authority is constructed and challenged around the body both within and outside colonial/imperial framings. This roundtable aims to move forward and promote scholarship that is more attentive to diverse stories and more attuned to questions of justice and power in ways that, in turn, speak back to our current predicament.