Dr Jon Shaffer

Hecht-Levi GLIDE Postdoctoral Fellow, Johns Hopkins University Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Ethox Centre

February - March 2023

Dr. Jon Shaffer is a Hecht-Levi GLIDE Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Ethox Centre.

His current work is in writing a book about the political construction of public health science within “model demonstration projects” working to control noncommunicable diseases in global health.

The book compares two model public health demonstration projects. The first, in Finland, succeeded in making legible the problem of noncommunicable diseases as understood and experienced by citizens in the Global North. The second, in Sierra Leone, is challenging that understanding, based on the experiences of impoverished people in the Global South. Through this comparison, he demonstrates how conflicting normative principles of just action and right knowledge are enacted, contested, and settled at the local, institutional, and global governance levels in the field of global health practice.

In the future, Jon plans to study the intersection of contentious politics and epistemic practices of health justice movements in both the Global North and Global South.