Date/time: 4th of May, 14:30-15:30
Place: Jekteviksbakken 31
It is with great pleasure that we invite you to a talk about the book “When Misfortune Becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality” by the author Alicia Ely Yamin followed by a conversation with Siri Gloppen.
The book surveys the progress and challenges in deploying human rights to advance health and social equality over recent decades. Alicia Ely Yamin weaves together theory and firsthand experience in a compelling narrative of how evolving legal norms, empirical knowledge, and development paradigms have interacted in the realization of health rights, and challenges us to consider why these advances have failed to produce greater equality within and between nations. In this revised and expanded second edition, Yamin incorporates crucial lessons learned about the state of global health equity and public health systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating just how incompatible the current institutionalized world order—based on neoliberal, financialized capitalism—is with one in which the rights of diverse people around the globe can be realized. COVID-19 struck a world that had been shaped by decades of disinvestment in public health, health systems, and social protection, as well as privatization of wealth and gaping social inequalities within and between countries, and the evident crisis of confidence in the capacity of democratic political institutions and global governance was deepened by the pandemic. Yamin argues that transformative human rights praxis in health calls for addressing issues of structural inequality and political economy, and working across disciplinary silos through networks and social movements.
About the author:
Alicia Yamin currently teaches law and public health at Harvard University. She has over thirty years of experience in human rights practice, living and working with advocacy organizations across the globe.
This event is part of the RDV WEBINAR SERIES, which is a collaboration between the Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism and the Centre on Law and Social Transformation at the University of Bergen. The RDV webinar series is an interdisciplinary webinar where we invite national and international researchers to talk about their pioneering research on topics regarding law, democracy, and welfare.
Cover design & collage: Lindy Kasler
Photography: Adobe Stock and Shutterstock