Decolonizing public and planetary health, or Chthulucene mediations.

Abstract

The struggle for decolonization, especially in public and planetary health, indeed requires a relational space as a call for global accountability.1 The recent correspondence rightly pointed out the dominance of Western academia in the discussions and worried about treating ‘decolonization’ as just another buzzword. It can be argued whether newer terms of mediation such as Chthulucene within the language of systems thinking can intervene for the future of global health. The concept of the Chthulucene enters the debates as a current synthesis of the previous analyses on the current epoch, i.e. Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Plantationocene. Donna Haraway coined the term to mean the ‘name for the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces’ that makes possible the ‘flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages’.2 In these assemblages, Haraway notes, ‘it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems’.2 On this note, we can highlight the panelists on Decolonizing Health at Harvard Medical School, Mariam Olivia Fofana, Desmond Jumbam and Munshi Shehnaz, who discussed how global health cannot easily disentangle the uneven power relations of the existing system. They review the origins of global health and deliberate how its legacy impacts current practices and identify imbalances in global health knowledge production research practices, funding opportunities and acknowledgment of research contributions from researchers in the global South.