IAS Seminar: Creative arts and the psychopolitics of global health in Africa

IAS Guest Speaker Professor Ama de-Graft Aikins (The London School of Economics and Political Science) delivers a seminar on their research:

Arts-based global health interventions in African settings - for HIV/AIDS, malaria, Ebola, COVID-19 - employ conceptual approaches that have been described as ‘instrumental’. Typical projects lead communities (and artists) into ‘participatory’ and ‘co-created’ arts - dance, theatre, drawing - that have already been planned for them.

I will argue these dominant global health approaches have roots in colonial medicine and deeply held representations of Africa as ‘a familiar alien threat’. Drawing on Fanon’s idea of the “psychic life of the colonial encounter” - how African psychological realities were conditioned by relations of racialized power and violence - and Ghanaian examples, I show how the “psychic life of the colonial encounter” has morphed into “the psychic life of the contemporary global health encounter”. Developing transformational approaches to global health interventions in African settings, whether mediated by arts or not, require that these psychopolitical dynamics are understood, worked through and transcended.

Arrivals from 11.45am for a 12pm start. For those joining in-person, lunch will be served after the seminar from 1pm.