Coloniality and Speculation in Global Health: addressing the lived-experience of racialization among Honduran low-income urban residents through their encounters with public health services.

I am applying for a 24-month postdoctoral fellowship with the Insituto Universitário de Lisboa (Iscte). During my fellowship, I will utilize new and existing data to argue that the phenomenon known as global health should be conceived of as an additional domain for the private accumulation of capital through speculation. By addressing global health as a site for speculation, I intend to make evident that what appear as colonial ideological remnants in contemporary local public health practice are in effect necessary tools for the re-inscription of categories of colonial difference. These tools, in turn, facilitate processes of exploitation and alienation that allow for the extraction of value. I further intend to argue that regimes of speculation in global health serve as the foundation for the coloniality of local public health practices. To construct my argument, I will compare data collected over the course of 28 months of mixed methods ethnographic research in Honduras with new data that I will collect, in the same research locales, over the course of 6 non-consecutive months of research. The extended and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, presents an opportunity to compare previous base-line data with new information. The data for this project will be collected in two neighboring cities that comprise the Central District of Honduras, Central America (Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela). The data will address the experiences and perceptions of low-income urban populations with public health and private health services, their perceptions of health-disease processes, and their perceptions of and experiences with governmental agents and institutions. Overall, I will produce academic articles, participate in professional conferences, write critical popular media pieces, conduct workshops with public health professionals, prepare a proposal for a book manuscript, write academic syllabi, and design a multi-year project proposal with a Honduran community-based organization.