Roundtable
A Panel and Roundtable Connecting Premodern History to Issues in Public Health Today, as part of Global Public Health Week 2025.
When:
9 April, 9am Melbourne local time (GMT+10)
8 April, 6pm Chicago local time (GMT-5)
Where:
Zoom, online
Speakers:
Guy Geltner (Monash University): Social and Environmental Historian, currently researching the public health practices of miners, and their management of the environment, in southern Italy, 1100-1550.
Shireen Hamza (Northwestern University): Historian of Science and Technology in the Islamic World, currently researching the role of the ulema (Muslim scholars) in group prophylaxis and the history of public bathing.
Aydogan Kars (Monash University): Islam intellectual historian, currently researching prophylactic theory and practice in Muslim legal, mystical, and travel texts for religious travelers between 1200-1500.
Registration Form here.
Event Description:
Public health practitioners and researchers increasingly recognise the environment and climate health as integral to the public health of communities. We are tasked with finding sustainable, resilient health systems for an uncertain climate future and changing world, and investigating the multiple ways that “public health” can be practiced. One key part of this process is in the decolonisation of public health, which includes addressing historical and systemic inequities in public health, recognising diverse cultural and social contexts, and building a fairer, healthier future – for all. These are the focus of the Global Public Health Week 2025. Decolonisation is a path forward that could address colonial inequities, but it depends on honest reckonings with the past.
Public health is commonly understood as a modern phenomenon. However, communities all over the world practiced public health in their own ways, with various ingenuities and multiple viewpoints, for hundreds of years. What public health practices have been lost to us over time? Could communities consider harnessing them as resources or inspiration today? Decolonising public health is not just about understanding the impacts of colonisation and systemic inequities now. It is also about understanding the way that the framework of “public health” was constructed in the first place, influenced by colonialism and Eurocentrism.
In this Panel Discussion/ Roundtable, historians Guy Geltner, Shireen Hamza, and Aydogan Kars, share the implications and insights of their work into public health attitudes and practices leading as far back as the 12th century. Their work spans South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe and explores the ways in which “public health” was managed by people. They discuss how public health included practices that we might today take for granted or not immediately recognise as public health – like the importance of water and the environment to bodily constitutions, the dissemination of materials to the public, the entanglement of spiritual and physical health practices, and various prophylactics – preventative methods – to ward off illness. Importantly, their research highlights how public health in history included the integral relationships between environmental health and human health, and between religion and public health dissemination. This panel hopes to highlight to all contemporary practitioners the importance of looking to history – by six hundred years or more – in pursuing public health innovations, and in decolonising its processes.
This Roundtable is an exciting opportunity during GPHW to connect public health practitioners with public health historians, to “Decolonise Public Health for a Healthier World”.
This event is organised by the ARC Discovery Project research project “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800” and generously funded by the ARC.
For questions or more information, please contact Sarah May: sarahmay.comley@monash.edu
Public health practitioners and researchers increasingly recognise the environment and climate health as integral to the public health of communities. We are tasked with finding sustainable, resilient health systems for an uncertain climate future and changing world, and investigating the multiple ways that “public health” can be practiced. One key part of this process is in the decolonisation of public health, which includes addressing historical and systemic inequities in public health, recognising diverse cultural and social contexts, and building a fairer, healthier future – for all. These are the focus of the Global Public Health Week 2025. Decolonisation is a path forward that could address colonial inequities, but it depends on honest reckonings with the past.
Public health is commonly understood as a modern phenomenon. However, communities all over the world practiced public health in their own ways, with various ingenuities and multiple viewpoints, for hundreds of years. What public health practices have been lost to us over time? Could communities consider harnessing them as resources or inspiration today? Decolonising public health is not just about understanding the impacts of colonisation and systemic inequities now. It is also about understanding the way that the framework of “public health” was constructed in the first place, influenced by colonialism and Eurocentrism.
In this Panel Discussion/ Roundtable, historians Guy Geltner, Shireen Hamza, and Aydogan Kars, share the implications and insights of their work into public health attitudes and practices leading as far back as the 12th century. Their work spans South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe and explores the ways in which “public health” was managed by people. They discuss how public health included practices that we might today take for granted or not immediately recognise as public health – like the importance of water and the environment to bodily constitutions, the dissemination of materials to the public, the entanglement of spiritual and physical health practices, and various prophylactics – preventative methods – to ward off illness. Importantly, their research highlights how public health in history included the integral relationships between environmental health and human health, and between religion and public health dissemination. This panel hopes to highlight to all contemporary practitioners the importance of looking to history – by six hundred years or more – in pursuing public health innovations, and in decolonising its processes.
This Roundtable is an exciting opportunity during GPHW to connect public health practitioners with public health historians, to “Decolonise Public Health for a Healthier World”.
This event is organised by the ARC Discovery Project research project “Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800” and generously funded by the ARC.
For questions or more information, please contact Sarah May: sarahmay.comley@monash.edu
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