Global Health Issues Week 3 Discussion

Many Westerners engage in a high degree of ethnocentrism which is the belief that one’s own culture is superior to all others and that their culture’s way of thinking about the world or doing things is the only correct way. Exceptionalism is evident in the belief that people from other cultures are “under-developed”, “primitive”, or “savages”. Western educational systems generally teach from an “Eurocentric” perspective which means students are mostly exposed to the ideas of old,rich,white,straight,often long-dead men. The social theories that underpin the discipline of global health are no exception. The ideas from amazing scholars from the 84% of the world that is non-Western are not regularly presented to students.

We will be critically analyzing how Western ethnocentrism and exceptionalism regularly creates problems in global health work. Some of the problematic Western ethnocentric and exceptionalist ideas we will consider are: 1) “Doing something is always better than doing nothing”, 2) “I want to be a voice for the voiceless”, 3) “Impoverished people in developing countries always want our help”, 4) “Westerners know best how to help impoverished people in developing countries” and 5) ” People in impoverished countries, who are closest to the problems, are not well-educated and are therefore not capable of developing their own solutions”.

Module Learning Objectives
By the completion of this module, the student should be able to do the following:

Critically analyze and reflect on ideas that challenge the notion of Western ethnocentrism and exceptionalism.
Critically analyze and reflect on the effects of Western ethnocentrism on global health work.
Required Learning Activities
Reading:

Ethnocentrism

The White Savior Industrial Complex — Teju Cole

No White Saviors

The reductive seduction of other people’s problems

The third world is not your classroom

How not to save the world: Why US students who go to poor countries to do good often do the opposite

Volunteering abroad? Read this before you post that selfie

Barbie challenges the ‘white savior complex’

Video:

Meet the women behind #nowhitesaviors

Assignments and Grading Rubric
Reaction and Reflection _1 Assignment instructions and grading rubric.docx

Reaction and reflection 1 questions template.docx

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.