Ep. 4 | Dr. Bilal Butt - Rethinking Global Health through Environment & Place

In this episode of Voices from the Field, we speak with Dr. Bilal Butt, a Professor in the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability and Senior Advisor at the U-M Center for Global Health Equity whose work sits at the intersection of environmental justice, conservation, and global health.

Dr. Butt joins Neil Nakkash to discuss how geography and environment shape global health challenges, drawing from his experiences working with communities in East Africa and within academic institutions in the United States. He reflects on the tensions between conservation and local livelihoods, the limitations of top-down approaches to global health and development, and the importance of understanding health through place, land, movement, and environmental change.

Throughout the conversation, Dr. Butt shares insights on environmental geopolitics, community-engaged research, and the broader systems that influence global health inequities. For students interested in global health, environmental justice, sustainability, and international fieldwork, this episode offers a thoughtful perspective on rethinking global health beyond the clinic.

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See you next time on Voices From the Field.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Voices from the Field, the Namaneksham podcast. I'm your host, Neil Nakash, and in this episode, I spoke with Dr. Bilad Butt about the relationship between environmental justice and global health. Drawing from his field experiences in Kenya and his academic position in the United States, we discussed the challenges, tensions, and lessons that emerge in global health and conservation work. Dr. Butt is a professor in the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability and a senior advisor at the Center for Global Health Equity. His research sits at the intersection of environmental justice, health equity, and environmental geopolitics, particularly in East Africa. With that, here's my discussion with Dr. Bilal Butt. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Butt. Thank you for having me. So the first question that I wanted to ask is really about your career. So you've built a career at the intersection of geography, the environment, and global health. Could you just start us off by walking us through your journey and what really drew you to this work in particular?

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Great question. A lot of folks sort of confuse uh my discipline of geography as geology. And I had to, you know, have spent a lifetime basically correcting with folks on that. But what is what's so appealing to me about geography is geography is the study of spatial relationships that we like to look at how things come together across space and increasingly across time, which is the other core social science history. Um I'll start with a little anecdote, if you don't mind, about uh how I started to think about bringing geography, environment, and global health together. And this goes back to my uh dissertation fieldwork. And so I did about 18 months of field work in southern Kenya in a place called the Masaimara, which has been my long-term um uh field research site. And it involved at that time putting GPSs on cows, and I had to wrestle them to the ground and I would duct tape them on the cowbell. And uh, for me, going back to geography as a spatial discipline was about understanding where cows were going and what's what you know factors were driving their movements and um trying to think a little bit more about the sustainability of a livelihood system in the face of climate change, with drought coming more becoming more frequent, where are cows moving to, how are they adapting to these climatic changes, and so on. And so, you know, the rule that I had developed was that you know, you've got to put this GPS on the cow and you've got to be there, anticipate when the cow is gonna leave the household, the pastoralist household, and walk, you know, and graze and it becomes herded, right? But that meant that you would have to be ready to go whenever the cows were ready. And so you'd have to anticipate being there and having conversations with the families about when the cow was going to go, when they were gonna take the cows out uh herding. And because you know, that could have been at all hours of the day or night, it became and they're very dangerous wildlife around, they were constantly surrounded by lions and elephants, hippos, and whatnot, you had to be in a vehicle and you needed a good vehicle, and you needed a four-wheel drive vehicle. And by virtue of that, and because of the pastoral households being uh further away from each other, I spent a lot of my time driving. And when you're driving in these rural landscapes, you're seeing people that are also walking tremendously long distances to get to where they need to go. And um I essentially was giving lots of lifts to people. And the majority of the time that I was stopping and giving lifts to people, it was largely um mothers with sick children. And they were walking these longer distances in order to be there, particularly like say on a Wednesday, which is when market day would happen. And market day would be an occasion to take anyone who might be sick, any of the children that might be sick to the doctor and then come back. Um, and as a result, I would have these conversations in the car around, you know, oh, I'm sorry to hear that the child is sick or or that they themselves were sick. Um and it would strike up this lovely conversation about the hardships that people were experiencing with health and the environment. Um and there were some wonderful ways in which something as simple as giving a uh a ride to someone could, you know, translate into a career where you then start. So I'll give you an example of a conversation that happened was um, sorry, the child is not well, like you know, or first I recognized that the child was with them. I was like, oh, why are they not in school? You know, not feeling well, so going to the clinic. Oh, so what's wrong? What's the matter? And and this mother said, Oh, this child has anthrax. And immediately I was startled because I had a very sort of 9-11 understanding of anthrax as being this biological agent. And then um I said, How do you know the child has anthrax? And then she pointed to the child and said, Oh, you know, show him. And he sort of opened his mouth and you could see a very clear anthrax sore. And it's a very easy thing to actually figure out and say, Oh, this is anthrax. Um, and then as I, you know, took the child to the clinic, I started to get more interested in this question of how does anthrax uh infection occur and why is it here? And of course, the narrative when you look then deeper into the literature is that anthrax is uh something that um you know happens when uneducated people eat infected meat. And because it's a it it's you know, livestock have it, but the more I dug into it, there were these elements of the spore itself that I didn't know about. For example, the spores can stay active in the ground for up to 40, 50 years sometimes. Um, you know, there are different types of anthrax, you can have it uh cutaneous, you can then have it in ingest it. Um, and there are ways in which the changing environment, so you can have these spores, you can have you know increases in wind speed, um, livestock have it as domestic animals, but wildlife have it as well. Rhino have it, hippos have it, buffalo have it. So you're in a landscape where livestock and wildlife are interacting with each other, and there are a lot of the, you know, you could understand sort of the complex landscape of disease reservoirs between rivers, wildlife, grasses, people. And I really wanted to use that as a lens to think much more about global health. Um, if anything at all, to push back on this idea that these were uneducated people who was blindly eating infected meat without thinking much more about the historical context of the livelihood system as a livelihood system that has, you know, had livestock for over 3,000 years, these people have lived with livestock. I think they would know when the meat would be infected and they would not be eating infected meat. Yet the journals were often describing it in that way.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

It's very unfortunate, but also just very fascinating and you know how you got to see those intersections because for you it was very much a local reality. You know, you were seeing these people get infected with anthrax, not a result as you know, as it was in the case of post-9-11 um America, where we heard about it being uh used as a biological weapon, but rather as a result of their circumstances. Um, and that really leads me to my next question, which is when we think about climate change, when we think about global health, they're often treated as these very like abstract topics, very broad. Um, but you've directly worked with communities impacted by climate change, um, you know, just having been grown up in Kenya and being embedded in these communities. Um, how has that perspective shaped the way that you approach environmental and global health research? Um, especially while working with an academic institution all the way here in the US?

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Um great question again. Uh I think it's about the fact that if you choose to you know prioritize your time um in say the hallways of academia, um you're doing so using the kind of lens that you see, which is the journal articles, the talks, and so on. And that's really important. It's really important for us when it comes to uh knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination, knowledge production. But it's one half of the story. The other half of the story is that you have to be able to understand the places that research is being written about. And sometimes it can be very lab-based, and other times it can be very experiential, very active, very primary, fieldwork-oriented. And that's where I have kind of straddled going back and forth a little bit. And so, you know, let's take something as simple as the geography of the place, the country, right? So you might find journal articles that have the title Kenya in them. And to me, Kenya is of course a very big place. And you read into the methods and the study site section, I'll say, well, it was this tiny area, it was this tiny place, it was this tiny sample. So, yes, it's geographically in Kenya, but really the story is about the dynamics around this local place. And that's really important because you've got to understand that. So it is about understanding who are the people that you're working with, who are the people being affected. And that can be, you know, based on the ethnicity, it can be based on the race, it can be raised or based on the class, or all of those things, but you have to put yourself into their shoes in what we call sort of the lived reality of people experiencing that. So it's one thing for an academic to write about the effects of climate change or flood on the health of people, it's quite another thing to experience it. And when you allow yourself or when you reprioritize so that you're understanding the conditions that people have gone through, you come up with a very different kind of research agenda where you're privileging the, you know, the climate climatological data much less and more what people are saying about how they're coping with flood. And as somebody who's been caught in one of these floods, um, you really have a very different perspective on what that means, right? When you go and interview uh a family member whose child has been washed away by the severity of a flood, that results in a very different kind of meaning around how are people coping with climate change. And in this part of Kenya that I work in, the climate change signature is really about more severe droughts and floods. And so people have to change their adaptation strategies in order to adapt to that changing frequency and intensity of droughts and floods. But we need those, we need those voices. And we are very privileged in academia to be able to go back and forth, and those folks are not able to. So we also have a tremendous responsibility about bringing those voices in a way that don't reinforce some of the tropes that we have. Like they're uneducated, they don't know, they're dirty, right? These are all colonial tropes that I think have worked their way into our common understanding.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

And I think that really makes sense as someone, as you being someone who's not just been on the ground there, but as also having grown up there, you've been acutely aware of the tropes that exist, you know, that impact the global south after now arriving in the global north. Um, and you also touch on the fact that as being a geographer, you're interested in studying place and the people there. Um, but you also, you know, approach global challenges through these ideas such as our relationships with the land. Um, how does you know that that understanding that you have as a geographer help reveal, I guess, dimensions of global health challenges that might otherwise uh be overlooked or at least underrecognized?

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah, and and and a big part of this has been uh has come about through my involvement with the Center for Global Health Equity, which has really helped me understand uh more about how to translate what I'm seeing locally into some of these bigger challenges. Um you know, at CGHU, we're talking about challenges such as, you know, um childhood cancers, for example, and or uh the frequency of, you know, increasing frequency of um esophagal cancers, for example. And, you know, then where does that on-the-ground experience sort of translate into that is around what some of these drivers might be, right? So, how can we actually understand what are causing these problems? Why, for example, in certain parts of Kenya are there really high rates of certain stomach cancers over others? And it's often the case that environmental drivers are a key part of that, whether that's you know, increasing toxins in food or whether it's about increasing pollution in waterways or reliance on certain foods over others. But it is really about sort of understanding how people live on a day-to-day basis, and importantly, not to romanticize or agglomerate people into certain categories. So not all Kenyans are the same, not one all people of one ethnicity are the same. They are variations in that, right? There are people who have better, some have better access to water than others. So, where do the vulnerabilities lie and where do those vulnerabilities result in these disproportional rates of horrible diseases? And I think this is a challenge that a lot of global health folks um are concerned with because we want to get to early detection, early diagnoses, and then focus also institutionally on what we can do in terms of delivering better care. And a lot of that is about understanding power and politics. And this sort of leads me to a key part of my work as a geographer, which is it's about understanding power. Who has power, who deploys it, where is it wielded, whose voices are being heard, whose are being ignored, why, to what effect, and so on. And even though global health has not traditionally looked at those sorts of questions, they are increasingly dealing with that. And I think here it's been a really nice confluence of ideas to take some of the strengths of uh a subdiscipline like political ecology, which is what I focus on, with global health. And this unveils a lot of the layers around um unveiling the complexities of global health and figuring out where are the problems and what kind of approaches can we take to overcome some of those. So it's really exciting to learn from different fields. And I think this is the really the beauty of uh centers or institutes or initiatives that sort of tend to break down disciplinary boundaries and encourage a lot of um uh conversations across the fields.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

You're bringing me right into my next question because we think about global health, and oftentimes the things that are really focused on in global health include infectious disease surveillance, global diagnostics, you know, healthcare delivery more generally. But as a geographer, you bring in a different view. So you mentioned that you are involved in the University of Michigan Center for Global Health Equity, where you are a senior advisor there. What perspectives or directions you know do you hope to bring as you're with this perspective to the center and to the field of global health more broadly?

SPEAKER_01 16:22

There are a couple of really important areas, I think, that uh that we're trying to think through. One is one that we mentioned previously about bringing conversations around uh cancer care uh much more front and center. Um and uh there it's about bringing you know uh oncologists along with uh environmental health folks, uh toxicologists, uh epidemiologists, and others together with people who study water security, uh, with anthropologists and geographers and historians, so that we can have a more complete picture. Um, so that's certainly one of those is trying to think about um, you know, uh diseases like cancer. Um the other is to recognize that when it comes to global health, where where are we where are we looking to? So the globe, as you know, is a big place, right? And then uh everywhere, right? Uh we won't be we won't be we have we are we are on the globe somehow. Um and where are we getting information to help inform global health debates? They're coming from local places. But most of the conversations have been about if we take you know euphemistically these terms global north and global south. The the idea historically had been that the global north was the places were places of like, you know, uh where we refined diagnosis, where we refined treatment, and then we kind of developed it first in the global north, and then we went to the global south, right? Um, and this happens a lot with the training, right? You would train in the global north and then you would go to the global south or something like that. And increasingly we recognize that um, you know, that if we are to succeed at doing global health in a more equitable way, we've got to break down some of these barriers, right? Uh including the labels global north and global south, and instead actually come up with partnerships and programs that allow us to go across these different geographies. And what we learn, from example, from private health clinics in Kenya could be really important for public health in Michigan. What we learn from small clinics in southern Kenya could be really beneficial for small clinics in India. And so, in a way, we want to break down some of these barriers around you know, what what are these categories of places that we've been looking at? So that would be sort of the second, I think, big focus that we're trying to look at. The third is to look much more at um the technologies that we're increasingly using in healthcare and whether these technologies are really equitable. And of course, the big one that comes to mind is AI technologies. And it's clear that um, you know, AI can do some really important things and can really help folks become more productive, um, but it can also uh limit our critical thinking abilities. And where do we want to cede ground? Where do we want to cede territory to the AI to help us? And where do we want to maintain control? And if we cede some control to the AI or the algorithms, the LLMs, the whole industrial complex around AI, um then what are we losing? What is it helping us with, and what is it really hurting us with? And what are the net effects of this going to be? So when folks are thinking about things like auto-transcription in a in a doctor's office, where the AI is increasingly being used and trialed and you know, deployed in a great number of locations, you know, what are people comfortable with uh when it comes to having that? Um so I'll give you an example of an experience that we had where there's an organization that is increasingly looking at um transcribing uh a relationship between a doctor and a patient as they're um thinking about stomach pain. And you know, the way in which the AI is being trialed is that the both the patient and the doctor speak English perfectly, that they're able to communicate without barriers, that they don't feel um that there's a huge power relation between the two, that they're going to describe their symptoms perfectly. Right. And I contrast that against uh something else that um you know might occur in a small rural clinic in southern Kenya where the conversation is not in English, the severity of pain that is being described is is either being underrated or overrated, depending on on you know the time of the day, the fact that this person has had to maybe walk you know tens of kilometers to actually get to the place, they're answering in short terse statements. And the AI is being developed as a way to help diagnosis. And then the question is well, is the AI and the human infrastructure, the technological infrastructure behind it, going to be able to recognize that that this is what is actually happening, that that lived reality is coming to play when it comes to offering a diagnosis. And some of the you I'm sure you've seen, and so I'm sure some of the listeners have seen uh examples where you know you narrate a bunch of symptoms and it gives it spits out a diagnosis, right? And so, you know, um we were talking earlier about you know. Well, then what's the whole point of med school then if you can just sort of spit this out and who's going to tell you whether diagnosis is accurate or not? Right. And so we need that. We need to be able to, you know, wrestle with these um, you know, technologies and to think much more broadly about equity means in this context. And to remember that equity is always a work in progress. Right. That it's never equity's work is never done. It's always about bringing more voices, more places, more ideas to the table.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

I think with equity being central to the center's work, it's very important that that word is there because we're thinking about AI and the people who might utilize AI as a sort of supplement or even a replacement to the medical care that they're achieving, might actually deepen these inequities. For example, someone might rely on AI for their medical questions because they might not have the access. Or in the case of someone in southern Kenya, it might not be not just accessible because of insurance, as the case here in the States, but simply because the distance is so far and they don't have a reliable transportation to get there. Um, so I think that's that's a very important direction that you know you and others within the center are moving us towards.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

I hope so. And and you know, a big part of equity is about bringing some voices that haven't been heard before. So we need to be able to connect, you know, local clinicians who feel um, you know, safe enough and that they know that their opinion is valued and highly regarded, and and people feel like their voices and opinions will be valued and highly regarded. We want that. We badly need that if we're going to avoid the problems of the past.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

And sort of on the you know, the note of bringing in local perspectives, um, I'm gonna shift gears a little bit to talk about you know some of your work, some of your research directly on the ground in Kenya, uh, specifically with the Maasai people. Um, you had a study, maybe you could actually just talk us through that study a little bit, but you had a study um done with people who herd cattle, um, Maasai people who herd cattle near a national park. Can you just you know talk about that research a little bit um and show what it revealed that was sort of contrary um to what prior research has shown?

SPEAKER_01 24:13

Right. Um so this was uh this was something that uh was almost two decades in the making. Um I'm sure your your listeners and viewers would really appreciate like how long it takes to go from the conceptualization of an idea until you know until it's coming to uh fruition. But uh again, this is one of those those things that um happen sort of serendipitously where um you know if you're going to Kenya or Tanzania, the one thing that you're gonna be doing is you're gonna be going on safari because you want to see the wildlife. And uh it's often the case that when tourists you know are going on safari, they want to tick off the big five animals, right? So the the elephant, the rhino, the leopard, the buffalo, and the lion. And the last thing they expect to see is a cow grazing. Yes. And so my research was really about questioning both ecologically but also socially and politically, why that jarring um question was so important. And so the presence of livestock in national parks um reveals this tension around, you know, what is their role, and trying to think through what effect do livestock have in these protected areas. And so there are a couple really important points to walk through here. One, the presence of indigenous people and their livestock predates the idea of a national park. The national park is a very new idea, right? So it's it's only been less than the the oldest national park in Kenya was in the 1947. Um, but you know, sort of the idea of nature conservation is something that is not uh in the form that we're used to it, is is not an idea that comes um from uh indigenous people, right? They don't make a distinction between, oh, here's a protected entity, it's not. Um, and the second big thing is that you know those folks that often find this juxtaposition really jarring often fail to recognize their own um positionality and privilege. Like they're upset about seeing cows grazing in a national park. And I have to, you know, say to them, you know, what's more un unnatural? Is it you in this land cruiser spewing out diesel, or is it the cow eating grass? What are you more upset about here? But you know, what happens is that this this sort of effect of the way that the tourist felt in the in the in the in the line cruiser or seeing a cow grazing in a national park uh begins as a question around you know, that livestock and pastoralists and people in particular are detrimental to the world's biodiversity. And for a long time, this was a de facto way of thinking about the relationship between people and parks. And in fact, many indigenous people had been displaced, violently displaced, from these landscapes that eventually become national parks. So it's their ancestral land to begin with, they nurture it and care for it and actually allow for you know uh coexistence between wildlife and livestock. And then we come around in the 1960s and sort of say, you know, you people, you're the problem, and and displace them to the boundaries of national parks. Now, over time, of course, indigenous people are still using their ancestral strategies of like grazing. It's just now that we call it a national park and not. But for a long time, there were a whole generation of ecologists and others who said that the actions of uh livestock grazing were fundamentally ecologically detrimental to the survival of other species. And we wanted to really test this, going, well, you know, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense because if you look historically and politically and ecologically, these were people who had you know been in this ecosystem for for generations, right? So would pastoralists intentionally degrade the landscapes that they were dependent upon for grazing? No. Um, and so so we had a series of transects that we measured things like cow poop and you know, figuring out where they were uh you know having um grazing and looked at the uh in a very scientific, quantitative way, uh, looked at you know the protein content in the grasses, looking at the the fertility of the soil, and um using uh some really sophisticated models to actually assess that the effect of livestock on wildlife was actually negligible at best. And uh and this this resulted in a lot of um you know debate and discussion around what is the again going back to fundamentally rethinking what is the role of indigenous people in and around protected areas. The irony of this is, of course, that many organizations that run protected areas actually want livestock there because it's the livestock that makes the grass shorter. The shorter grass is more nutritious and actually attracts a lot of grazing ungulates, which then attracts a lot of um um, you know, large carnivores like lions and others, and that's what you know, tourists like to see. And so it is a fairly complex picture, but we had to move in that direction of like pilot testing and then you know, working on some some preliminary ideas, working on the grant, getting the grant funded, executing the fieldwork. This was almost two and a half years of field work, come rin, come shine. I mean, many times we would have to, we would be out on foot in the middle of the Maasaimara, you know, um, doing our surveys and and routinely be flooded roads, or there would be a lion sitting right on the transact line, or we'd have to get back in the car because there was an elephant that was very close to us, and so on. So, so it brought a lot of struggle to making sure that we could do this so that we could do work that was socially contextual and appropriate, but to use the tools of science to do it. So it was a lot of fun to do and and resulted in in uh a lot of debate and discussion. And I I love that because that's how how um it should be when it comes to knowledge generation.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

And as you mentioned, you know, 20 years in the making to you know achieve the study. Um, but you know, what the work really did was it, you know, challenged these sort of like top-down approaches to conservation um or international development that deem you know one idea or one way of one way of life or even a lack of life in this case, um a superior option. Um so what are some, I guess, you know, mistakes you continue to see um done by institutions when engaging um in sort of like international conservation or just even international or global research?

SPEAKER_01 31:07

There are a number. I think uh one is how do we how do we think at all about the place of local people in designing and executing research? Uh we have moved to a place where we are increasingly recognizing the role that local people play in developing the research questions, not sort of the way it had been previously, which is that you go, you do, you conduct all the research, and then the community was sort of like an afterthought to then say, oh, well, you know, the community might be interested in these results. And a lot of folks sort of didn't realized that you know that wasn't the way to do things because the community or the local people's buy-in was not there from the beginning, and had that buy-in been in there from the beginning, it would have fundamentally changed the way in which we would uh do the research. Um, so I think we've made a lot of progress in that regard, but in many ways we also haven't, in that institutions are very resistant to change. And I think this is part of the metrics around what is considered successful work, successful research, successful engagement. Um, for example, are researchers um incentivized or rewarded for working with communities? We're moving that way, but I think there's a long way yet to go towards understanding that more fully. Um, is it always the case that we have to use, we have to think about communities as sort of stakeholders? And stakeholders is an interesting word. You often you see it used a lot in the global health community. Um, I don't particularly like the word because I feel like it still reduces them down to um getting to vet what somebody else has decided. It's not truly uh uh a devolved decision making or um involvement from the beginning in terms of a co-design approach with local people, right? And so stakeholders is it very much comes off as a we've decided that this is a project, and then it might be good to get the stakeholders' opinion. So it's very much an afterthought rather than bringing the conversation up earlier. Um, the other, some of the big uh issues that I see with um institutions as a whole is that uh in order to do careful, more intentional work, one that doesn't sort of reinforce stereotypes or stigmas or reinforce the centers of power in the global north, it requires us to spend much more time in the places that we're want to do research. But often we're not given that time or um have the funds or the resources to be able to do that effectively. So as a result, we're always running to the places that we want to actually do our research in, and we're often doing parachute science where we're going in for short periods of time, we're sort of saying, Oh, yes, yes, yes, you really you really mean a lot to us, and then we disappear, and then we don't uh communicate with them until we need uh, you know, like a signature on a proposal or uh or demonstrate that you know we are actually working with you. So there's you know, so the institution becomes um uh gets lazy in a way of not actually making sure that these are you know intentional, meaningful um opportunities that take actually many decades to build up, right? It's not short-term work. And I think that as an institution, we could do better about rewarding long-term place-based emotions and building up cohorts of engagement that allow for multiple exchanges, right? Not just we go there, but then we make sure that the same happens in relationships.

SPEAKER_00 35:04

Yes. I think that's really relevant to a lot of the conversations that are happening right now. Um, since we focus on how we interact with I guess I'm gonna use a very broad word, just like stakeholders, but international partners. Um, but I I you know I do find your comments they very much ring to our our moment right now.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

Exactly. And you know, we're also in an era now where there is declining support for um work that allows us to you know think much more critically, deeply, and broadly about uh about where we where we see potential you know areas of engagement, right? Uh it it is true that academia should no longer sort of be up in the ivory tower, but that's a that's a very old and a very date dated argument. And I think also misses the fact that a lot of people do work to cross those boundaries um really hard. And sometimes a lot of that work is invisibilized to the institution. So we need to do more about sort of recognizing and rewarding that careful work in favor of the short-term glorification, right? The the you know, the glossy images that you see in pamphlets or websites, because a lot of the people that really do care about some of those partnerships being sustainable are less likely to even want their photographs um, you know, there. They they don't necessarily want to be the centers of attention. And I think we need to move to a place where we are recognizing that uh this work can happen in multiple ways rather than just the way in which we've been doing it.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

So finally, like I always ask this question to end us off with you know, the great conversation that we've heard from you. Um, you know, what are some books, just in general, media, shows, you know, that you'd recommend to the audience? It could be related to the topics and the issues that we're discussing, um, but it doesn't necessarily need to be.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 37:00

Um so I'm a big question, I know. It's a big question, I know.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Right, right. I'm I'm reading this book right now, which actually has a very famous uh uh he is a father of a pretty famous person, and this is Mahmoud Mamdani, who is a critical social scientist and anthropologist, and father to Zoran Mamdani, um, the mayor of New York City. And he had earlier this year come out with this book about uh Idi Amin and a history of Idi Amin. And I really enjoy uh the way in which he's writing about this moment in history, but also having lots of lessons uh for the future. Um and I think uh as somebody who you know has really privileged long templates-based fieldwork and working a lot with um institutions within the countries, I spent many years as uh director of the Macareri Institute of Social Social Research, um, you know, uh living and training a whole generation of critical social scientists. Um I really appreciated the way in which he had engaged with this work. Um other books, uh there is a fantastic book that um that I often think about a lot. Um it's not a very nice book in terms of the topic, but it's it's Jeremy Scahill's uh ghost um Dirty Wars, which is um about the rise of sort of uh um you know militarism and intervention in a post-9-11 era. And uh, you know, the kind of um writing and the kind of examples that I brought up the era are are um really interesting. And I I really um I think about it a lot actually, um in terms of empire and and imperialism. Um lots of other sort of little books, but we uh you know um I'm sure we don't have too much time, but uh I think um yeah, those are I I often read books, a lot of books around sort of uh around um genocide and violence, uh for obvious reasons, but also going back to Rwanda 94 and the genocide in Rwanda, um there's this wonderful book by Philip Gurevich called Um, it's a horrible title, so bear with me. The title of the book is We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow You Will Be Killed Along with Your Families. That's the title of the book. But it was really about the you know, the history, the genesis of the of the genocide in Rwanda. Um, and uh a really powerful book um that helps you understand a little bit more about you know what has happened in parts of the world that that people don't usually pay attention to.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

In undergrad, I feel that a lot of my studies really focused on not just genocide, but also the politics that surround it and what leads up to it. So on a personal level, this is very interesting, but it's it's inextricably linked with what the things that we were talking about before, from the colonial terms that we use, um, you know, to the nations or communities that are most often impacted by um environmental degradation and other global issues. So, you know, I find it very relevant to the conversation that we're having.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

Absolutely. At the end of the day, it's it's about, you know, it comes down to questions of power. Who has it? How is it being wielded? Um, to what effect, um, you know, what institutions are enrolled in in making the powerful more powerful, you know, what groups are being targeted in order for that power to be, you know, effected onto others. And I feel like that's a very useful way to think about some of the challenges we have, because we're not going to be able to engage thoughtfully into the problems of the future if we don't uh confront these questions of power and how that power is being wielded.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

And I think you are one of the scholars really addressing that. You are the director of the critical environment geopolitics research group, and it you know, it's really showing how these things, from you know, questions of politics, who holds powers all the way of who is impacted by the environment, how these different things uh are related. So, you know, your recommendations and everything, they'll make sense.

SPEAKER_01 41:11

Thank you. Yeah, and and if if anyone wants to get in touch, I'm happy to provide some more recommendations of readings. Um, you see the shelf behind me, and uh and I'm always trying to get more books to to read and to to at least look through and see how uh arguments are being built and and you know criticisms around other arguments, but find even gaps or holes in arguments. And uh, you know, one thing I would really encourage students and others, considering this is also about the next gen, um, is to you know really spend some time uh thinking about and asking the questions that you have often after a lecture or after uh a seminar. There's often the most important parts of that are ones that are discussed in the hallways later on, or you know, with connecting with your friends or others being like, oh, you know, I wish they had talked about this more, or they didn't really acknowledge this aspect. And what I'd really like to see in the future is to make those hallway conversations or side conversations part of the mainstream. We've got to be able to get to that point where that is valued alongside some of the other questions that we usually like asking, like, you know, um the statistical test or the theoretical approach or something like that. But we want to we want to ask those questions of like who do you think is the sleeves out? Or who is made more powerful because of this? Yeah. If you have a particular medical technology, for example, that you're trialing, or uh if you have a new approach that you want to what want to deploy uh when it comes to maybe early detection um of a disease or something like that, the whole framing of that has to consider difference. And the moment we do that, we actually end up with a better kind of uh of care and a better kind of research that allows us to bring in the people that are left to the margins much more into the center.

SPEAKER_00 43:11

Most definitely. And I think our conversations about AI really do fit that because while sure it'll close some gaps, it is very clear that it'll you know deepen inequity in other areas.

SPEAKER_01 43:21

Absolutely. Absolutely. And if we're not careful, you know, it will it will take a lot of the critical thinking away from us. We cannot seed ground in that area. Um, many times, you know, when we're we could ask the AI for prompts about the knowledge on a particular thing, we've got to remember about where most of that knowledge is coming from, right? Where it's being scraped from. And most of the time it's from Wikipedia and Reddit. Right. And those are the main sources for a lot of the the AI and the LLMs. And um, to recognize that that is still very wide. It is still very male. It is still very privileged knowledge. And it doesn't actually broaden the voices. And as a result, if we keep taking what the AI spits out at us without interrogating it much more carefully, then we run the risk of actually doing research that doesn't actually mean very much. It actually can even send us backwards, right, in our understanding. So we have to really use this time to think more carefully about what we want out of the AI systems and actually to push back, I would say, against uh it being forced on us, whether implicitly or explicitly. Yeah, you you cannot replace a library.

SPEAKER_00 44:44

Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. But I think the conversation was incredibly informative, but also offers you know next steps, next approaches about how we should think about global equity and the directions we should take.

SPEAKER_01 44:56

Thank you so much for having me, Neil. I really appreciated it.

SPEAKER_00 44:58

And I've enjoyed my time speaking with you. Thanks for listening to Voices from the Field, the Nama NextGen Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to follow us on Instagram, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube to stay updated on our upcoming episodes. We'll catch you next time on Voices from the Field.