Why do women still die when they don’t have to? The world has the tools, means, and a large amount of political will to stop this from happening. Yet for decades we see the repeat of similar patterns. Women doing more of the labour of healthcare. Women taking on greater economic, social, and political burdens as a consequence of major health emergencies. For every advancement in sexual and reproductive health, the threat of backlash. In this year’s annual lecture, Sophie Harman will argue that there are three powerful forces in the contemporary world that threaten any progress in stopping women from dying when they don’t have to. The first is the impact of populist politics on mainstream politics, science, and medicine. Second, the rise in institutional woke misogyny in response to #metoo and Black Lives Matter. Third, the hijacking of women’s empowerment and positive messaging around strong women and their value as a means of dismissing women’s health concerns and their labour. In this compelling lecture, Harman will offer a frank reflection of the state of women, gender, and global health in contemporary international relations, and offer a way of confronting these three forces to reclaim the fight for equality in health.

Sophie Harman Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London where she teaches and conducts research into Global Health Politics, African agency in International Relations, and Visual Politics. She has published seven books and numerous articles on these topics, most recently, Seeing Politics: film, visual method and international relations. In 2016 she co-wrote and produced her first narrative feature film Pili, which was nominated for a BAFTA for outstanding debut for a British writer, producer, or director in 2019. She was the recipient of the Political Studies Association Joni Lovenduski Prize for outstanding achievement by a mid-career scholar and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2018.