“Do not defend the indefensible”: elements for a cosmopolitical and antiracist approach to public health at the end of the world

Abstract

In the context of growing discussions about decolonization in the field of health, this essay aims to present a conceptual framework mobilized by the relationship between cosmopolitical propositions, disputes over care, black feminist poetics, and debates about the end of the world. It argues that there is a strong constraint on the imaginative limits of the field and that this is not a technical, funding, or ideological problem. To enable more forceful reorganizations of democratic struggle today, it seems necessary to dismantle and experiment with possibilities for epistemic-political and administrative reorganization. Based on a larger process of anthropological research with people, networks and territories that, in different ways, experience public health (the state, rights, science and modernity) from a certain distance and with suspicion, this essay offers fertile resources to help in the necessary reformulations of public/collective health and to rethink training processes, knowledge production and, potentially, political-administrative estrategies. The speculative possibility that opens up is to venture to see and recreate with and from multiple diverse perspectives, initially adopting the ontological multiplicity of subjects/worlds/relations to/from health, the epistemic multiplicity, and the multiplicity of praxis and political speculations.