Post Colonial Spaces, Infrastructures and Digital Health Regulation

Thursday, September 12, 2024 from 2:30 pm to 4:00 pm

• In-person event
• Loeb Building, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

Please join us on September 12th at 2:30 pm for a discussion with special guest, Sharifah Sekalala!

Abstract: Globally, there has been increased attention on digitalising health systems, and in the Global South, digitisation is perceived as instrumental in advancing health access and achieving developmental goals. Critical scholarship has paid attention to the capitalist logic of accumulation in digital technologies and drawn parallels to historical colonialism (see Kwet, 2021; Coleman, 2019; Couldry and Mejias, 20218). However, there are still some scholarly gaps, specifically in understanding the ways in which post-colonial spaces embedded legalities within health systems have promoted domination and oppression in health and other domains of human existence. With an increased shift to digital health, there is an urgent need for scholarship to pay attention to the ways in which colonialities are enabled by digital health norms and political economic configurations which exist in post-colonial contexts as a result of the legacy of colonialism. In this paper, we interrogate the ways in which digital health physical, non-physical and normative infrastructures such as regulatory frameworks (and lack thereof) enable and amplify exploitative, extractive and violent practices as enduring structures of coloniality in space and time. We use the case of Discovery and its Vitality programme – launched in 1994, three years after the end of apartheid – and its recently launched Digital Health App to illustrate the ways historical post-apartheid policies served as a pre-configuration of existing digital health infrastructures and resulting inequalities.

About the speaker: Sharifah Sekalala is a public international lawyer whose research interests cover legal governance issues with particular emphasis on the relationship between trade, development and health in Sub-Saharan Africa. She has published in various peer reviewed journals on these issues and has consulted for several International Organisations such as UNAIDS and the International Labor Organisation. Sharifah is actively involved with networks of legal academics and practitioners seeking to create legal change in Global Health.

Registration is required.

Zoom link will be sent to participants upon registration. Light refreshments will be provided for in-person attendees