Fakes, Fabrications and Falsehoods? Interrogating the social, ethical and political features of pseudo-global health (360G-Wellcome-209830_Z_17_Z)

A new phenomenon appears to be emerging in the enterprise of global health: a blurring between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ in a number of its key goals. In different geographical locations, the same object can be simultaneously regarded as both ‘real’ (i.e. certified and authentic) and ‘fake’ (i.e. uncertified and inauthentic). The vision of this research is to explore, using everyday examples, how this paradox is possible. A number of interconnected projects and inter-disciplinary methodologies are proposed to investigate two key goals in global health which are: knowledge production and access to drugs and medicines. Within these key goals, illustrative case studies from areas simultaneously considered real and fake will be explored as examples of ‘pseudo-global health’ and this concept will be assessed for its analytic potential. This research seeks to directly engage in the areas of ambiguity in global health to further understand how uncertainty and moral paradoxes are reconciled in practice. This necessitates a focus on the operations of global health at different; scales (global online networks and frontline field-level experiences), locations (e.g. contexts in the global north and south) and actors to capture the lived experiences and the structural factors which shape this phenomenon.