Ethox and WEH Seminar - Gender as structural and epistemic vulnerability in global health emergencies

Abstract

In this paper, I take cases from various Global Health Emergencies, such as the story of Salome Karwah Harris (the Liberian nurse who was at the forefront of the Ebola fight and died during childbirth in 2017) among others, to examine to what extent gender can be a marker of structural and epistemic vulnerabilities. While emergencies are sites of a range of health-related vulnerabilities, they are also contexts in which dispositional vulnerability can rapidly transform into occurrent vulnerability and injustice, if responses are not informed by existing inherent and situational factors. Using the lenses of structural and epistemic vulnerabilities, as well as non-ideal theory, I ask how responses and moral obligations can be developed that are both attuned to the demands of justice and of a non-ideal moral context.