Navigating authoritarian politics: towards reflexive framing in healthcare research

TL;DR

This paper explores how health researchers navigate political challenges in authoritarian countries by using strategic framing to protect themselves and their collaborators.

Contribution

The study introduces the concept of 'reflexive framing' as a critical practice for navigating political constraints in Global Health research.

Findings

Researchers avoid politically sensitive topics to maintain access and protect collaborators in authoritarian contexts.

Strategies include conforming to apolitical language and methodologies in health research.

The authors argue for political reflexivity to uncover biases and norms in health research.

Abstract

How do Northern Global Health scholars navigate authoritarian political contexts in their research in other countries? This question motivated the research project on which this article is based. Over ten months, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with sixteen European and North American scholars who were engaged in health-related research in an authoritarian country we refer to as Patria.

All our interviewees recognized health as a political matter and acknowledged the importance of considering politics in Global Health research. Yet, they were reluctant to explicitly integrate politically sensitive topics and discuss questions related to local political context in their research. To gain and maintain access, and to protect themselves and their local collaborators in a politically sensitive and authoritarian context, the researchers employed practices of ‘framing’. Such strategies included avoiding terms, scholarly references, and questions that were politically loaded; strategically conforming to the assumed apolitical language and methodologies of health research, and negotiating with and leaning on their local counterparts in processes of research dissemination and writing.

Drawing on frame theory and literature on fieldwork and authoritarianism we discuss the implications our findings have, not only for Global Health research, but for healthcare sciences more broadly. While researchers who work in authoritarian regimes may be particularly prone to engage in practices of framing, the strategies our interviewees used are not limited to Global Health researchers working in such settings. As anthropologists with experience researching health in multiple countries, including in the United States, we recognize the strategies that our interlocutors used from our own research. By including a discussion of some of the ways political factors have shaped our research we make an argument for the value of political reflexivity in health research: the critical scrutiny of the taken-for-granted presuppositions and norms that guide our research, and of the political environments and power dynamics that shape and are shaped by our research. A turn to political reflexivity in health research can unravel some of the tacit assumptions, biases, norms and practices that are integral to the health care sciences and which students and researchers must critically think about.