GLIDE Fellow, Arsenii Alenichev, has developed a new collaborative project to explore the ethics of global health visuals.
In recent years, global health institutions and practitioners have increasingly been using images of people in communities; suffering, expressing resilience or receiving care. The aim of these images is pragmatic: to tell a compelling story, establish emotional affinity, attract funding and communicate global health to stakeholders and the general public.
The challenges inherent in ‘putting people into the picture’ come to the fore in light of the global call for decolonizing global health and building a fairer and more just system, wherein careful and reflective visual representation is a must. This requires not only evaluating the ethics of the images’ content, but also finding ways to ethically use the images without abusing the contexts in which they were taken.
Against this background, this project aims to take global health images seriously through the lenses of transdisciplinary bioethics.
The project team includes collaborators from the University of Oxford, Johns Hopkins University and McMasters University.
For more details about the project visit Putting people and diseases into the picture: Towards an ethics of global health visuals.