Episode 8: Kim Yi Dionne on Pandemic Response in Africa

In this episode of the Global Health Politics Podcast, I sit down with UC-Riverside Political Scientist Kim Yi Dionne to talk about pandemic response in Africa, the discipline of political science, and her engagement with Malawi.

Transcript

Global Health Politics Podcast 

Episode 8: Kim Yi Dionne on Pandemic Response in Africa

SPEAKERS

Joseph Harris, Kim Yi Dionne

Joseph Harris  00:00

Welcome to the Global Health Politics Podcast, where we go beyond the articles and books and have real intimate conversations with people working in the field of global health today, I'm your host, Joseph Harris, Today, I'm really pleased to be here with Dr Kim Yi Dionne. Dr. Dionne is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UC-Riverside and one of the leading voices in the field of Political Science, doing research on pandemic response. Her 2018 book, Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa, explored the mismatch between donor priorities and community needs in the response to HIV/AIDS. She's an expert in African politics and co-host of the well known podcast Ufahamu Africa with Rachel Beatty Riedl. Welcome to the podcast. 

Kim Yi Dionne  01:01

Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be a guest, moving on from being a listener.

Joseph Harris  01:06

Thanks so much. You've been working in the field of political science for some time now, and have made some really important contributions to the field of global health. What drew you to study global health initially?

Kim Yi Dionne  01:18

Well, it's funny, you should ask that because I'm here at BU to give a talk, and I actually talk about this in the beginning of my talk. So for those of you who have seen the talk, you'll hear this again. I thought I was going to go to graduate school to study ethnic conflict, but I was at a workshop where a senior political scientist who studies Africa mentioned how many more people die of AIDS than die in civil wars. And yet, political scientists don't study AIDS. And it was really that conversation, that kind of thought provoking comment that she made during this workshop that I was like, "Maybe I shouldn't be studying ethnic conflict. Like, maybe I should study this other thing that's really important?" And of course, I was in graduate school. That was 2003 when I heard this comment, and that was a time where, you know, Africa was, well, still is, but was, you know, really bearing a significant burden of the AIDS pandemic. And it seemed important to me that maybe I should study that. And I think it was that first project focused on AIDS that led me to think about health more broadly. And so, learning about other aspects of health, because AIDS is just one condition with which people can be afflicted with in Africa. There's many other things that challenge people's health in Africa, but, but yeah, it was that one comment someone made in a workshop that got me down this path.

Joseph Harris  02:42

What led you to focus on Malawi in particular? 

Kim Yi Dionne  02:45

You know, there again, this is another kind of like serendipitous story. I had taken years of training in Swahili. I was convinced I was going to study Tanzania for my dissertation. But then I met Susan Cotts Watkins, who's a sociologist and demographer. She was at the University of Pennsylvania for many years, and then she retired, moved to Los Angeles to be close to her family, so that she could be a part of her grandchildren's lives. And she got an affiliation with UCLA. And it was through that that I met her, and she invited me to go with her to Malawi. So Susan was one of the Co-PIs on this big National Institutes of Health grant that now we refer to it as the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH), and this big NIH grant allowed her and other PIs to invite graduate students to come to the field and help collect data. And that was what happened: she invited me, and I, like a typical lame grad student was like, "Nah, I got plans. I'm going to Tanzania. Like I don't even speak whatever language they speak in Malawi." And she looked at me, patient as she was, but she looked at me like I was an idiot, like she just offered me, effectively, a free trip to Malawi. And she said, "Listen, you know, congratulations on all of your training. That makes you think you can study Tanzania really well, but it's a very big country, and this question that you're interested in there, it's actually a better question to ask in Malawi." And I spoke with my advisor, and he said, "You know, give it a shot. You can always go to Tanzania in the future. You should go to Malawi." And so I kind of on a whim changed my plans for the summer, and I went with Susan and this band of 20-odd graduate student, faculty, researchers, to collect data. Then, it was the 2006 wave of data for the MLSFH, and I mean, again, like, here's this decision I made that really changed the path for me because now I can't imagine what my career would be like if I hadn't gone there. And I mean, I can't even imagine what my life would be like. I met my husband on that trip. You know, there was a lot, there's a lot that happened in 2006 in Malawi for me, and and I'm really grateful for everything I've learned from Malawi, and it's...Malawi is a place, and Malawians, as people, have taught me a lot about power and politics and well-being. And so, yeah, I'm I'm really grateful, and I've been really fortunate to have a lot of the opportunities that I've had to study Malawi.

Joseph Harris  05:29

The discipline of Political Science, hasn't historically focused on global health issues a great deal. What was it like to work on those issues early on, as someone who trained in political science?

Kim Yi Dionne 05:40

It was hard. You know, it felt a bit lonely. I felt like an odd duck. And I think, you know, as someone who you know, first generation college [student], and I already had this feeling in graduate school that I didn't, maybe I didn't quite belong, you know. I wasn't like the woman who went to Princeton who was an investment banker and was gonna study, you know, FDI and post-Soviet states. I had no idea what I was doing, and then I was doing this weird thing that nobody quite understood. It was like: why are you studying AIDS? Like, you should be in a public health PhD, and there weren't a lot of political scientists who studied health, and if they did, it was, they were weird, right? So it was, it didn't feel comfortable for a long time.

Joseph Harris  06:28

It sounds like you were dealing with imposter syndrome. 

Kim Yi Dionne  06:32

Yes, exactly that. Exactly that. And so what helped was being around other people studying health, but in a way that wasn't like a doctor prescribing medicine. It was like being around other people, that was the other graduate students in Malawi. They were sociologists or econ PhDs, and so, they were coming at the question, informed by their social science training. And I think that that helped a little bit. It also just helped to read, that there were other people writing great work, thinking about similar problems. So I, for a long time, I focused a lot of my reading on how social scientists were talking about education, because other social welfare policies and programming have some similarities to health, and so that helped a little bit. But it wasn't until, gosh, probably a little bit later, when the Ebola outbreak happened in in 2014 that I think people started to take seriously politics and health, but really that just was, like in spades, after the COVID pandemic emerged in 2020. I think now there's more people who think that political scientists should be examining health, or the way we understand health should be examined, not just from a biomedical perspective, but also a social, sociopolitical perspective. But I still think we're a little bit like, we're kind of odd balls still, you know, among political scientists, and sometimes, you know, I still hear that voice of this one professor when I was in graduate school presenting my practice job talk, who was like, well, where's the political science here? And I wish that version of me could have said, "Haven't you been paying attention? It's all over the place." Like, you can't talk about these principal-agent problems that I'm raising. You can't talk about political corruption, without being a political scientist. All of my training prepared me to think about these problems, and these problems are important. Just because they're not about coalition formation and a government that someone's never heard of doesn't mean that it's not also important. 

Joseph Harris  08:53

Your focus on Malawi, was that something that was relatively unheard of as well? Or had political science been engaging in Africa, and particularly Malawi before that as well?

Kim Yi Dionne  09:04

I do think that for as small as the country is in terms of land mass and the fact that it's land locked, you would think actually a lot of people wouldn't study Malawi, but political scientists have actually studied Malawi quite a lot. Ryan Briggs has a co-authored paper with Scott Weathers. It was published in African Affairs a few years ago, which kind of looked at who's publishing about which African countries in some of the main, leading African Studies journals and Malawi, like many other former British colonies, actually has a lot more research published about it than, pick your favorite Lusophone African country or Francophone African country. So it's a smaller place, but you know, some of the most famous pieces of work have come out of there. You know, my own advisor, Dan Posner, probably is best known for an article he published in the American Political Science Review about Chewas and Tumbukas, why they're allies in Zambia, but adversaries in Malawi. And I think that that paper, on its own, made Malawi a little bit famous among political scientists. But, yeah, there's a whole group of us who study Malawi. Of course, Malawi and political scientists like my frequent co-author, Boniface Dulani, he writes about African politics writ large, but a lot of his focus has been on Malawi. Amanda Robinson has written a lot on Malawi, really great work. And there's, you know, some early career scholars as well, who have been doing some tremendous work thinking about politics and power and competition in Malawi. 

Joseph Harris  10:08

That's great. What do you see as some of the most pressing issues in global health today?

Kim Yi Dionne  10:47

That's a great question. I think for me, the thing I care about the most right now, and that I wished more people were focused on in the study of global health politics is inequities. So we see a lot of racial disparities in health research in the United States. And when it comes to global health, I think, you know, there is work on it, and of course, like Alexander White's book, right, there's, I think that there's more of that, but I think much of what we're doing is just, it's just touching the surface of that. I don't think, I don't I think it's probably going to  take a while for us to really give it the attention it deserves. You know,  a lot of the earlier things I've read about global health were informed by Paul Farmer's work and thinking about structure and how this kind of international political economy shapes the way health is provided in different places, and  I think because when you talk about structure, people start to: "Oh gosh, this is going to be like a core- periphery talk". You know, people think it's like too theoretical and not grounded enough in data. And unfortunately, academics, a lot of us, especially, you know, early in our careers, were really incentivized to publish and to, you know, publish peer reviewed research. And what that means is we're kind of doing really marginal, limited kinds of research, you know, that are empirically driven and not theoretically driven. And I don't know, you know, I don't know if today, right, in 2024 someone would have the space and time to write a book about how social movements among professionals led, you know, a change in the provision of healthcare in a developing country. I don't know, could an early career sociologist write your book today? Because they think the pressures today are, you know, to get people to publish articles quickly and good outlets, and that's like, very empirically oriented, but it's not - I don't want to say that that's not valuable to science. I do think it advances social science, but there's something powerful about arguments, and I think for us to do the deep kind of work we would need to do to understand inequities and how what in the structure is leading to these unequal outcomes. I think it's going to require that kind of deeper work, and the deep thinking work that's harder to do.

Joseph Harris  13:38

I'm hearing sort of a desire for big ideas, for some of the work that I think about it that inspired me, work by people like Theda Skocpol and Peter Evans, that really took on major problems, but also thinking about these problems through comparison. Am I hearing that right, that you're wanting more of that?

Kim Yi Dionne  14:00

I think so. I mean, I guess, I even wonder if like, and maybe this is like, old age creeping in, but you know, it's like, why do I have to compare even? Can I look at one place really deeply and like, really think about this one place? And you know, it's not because I don't want to go anywhere else but Malawi. But I just think, you know, I wrote this essay recently in "Journal of Democracy" about how the rest of the world could learn a lot about democracy from just looking at this one small sliver of a country in land locked Africa, and understand, like, just looking at this place over time and seeing you know: what people are doing in this place like that can teach us a lot about how we should resist authoritarianism, right? I wonder if, you know, we could do that kind of work with other questions, especially in global health, you know, thinking about like, because here's the thing: even when you get to the point of comparison, right, you're having to, there's just a lot of variables at play. And so I think, you know,  I'm glad you bring up Theda Skocpol because, like, you know, when I went to graduate school, I was taught, like, everything she's doing is wrong, right? As you know, you can't do things like Theda Skocpol did because she's selecting on the dependent variable. You know, she's only looking at places where revolution happens and you can't do that: you've got to look at places where revolution didn't happen and,  so all of that training made me feel like I've got to have a lot of places. I've got to do a lot of, like, relevant comparisons. And now, that I'm older, you know, and of course, junior colleagues would be like: now you don't have to, you know, do the things that you require the rest of us to do. But I think there's a richness that comes from the thinking you can do when you know one or two or three cases really well. It provokes your ability to actually think about the mechanisms pushing this argument of, you know , how something is causing something else to happen.

Joseph Harris  16:04

 So my next question was going to be: "What is the discipline of Political Science poised to offer?", but what I'm hearing is that it's not just about breadth and comparison of cases; it's also about depth. It's about Malawi's health response in the long durée, for example. Is that right? 

Kim Yi Dionne  16:19

 I think so. I mean, I think other political scientists would disagree. I think that they would say, you know, one of the things that we offer is really rigorous training and quantitative methods, and that allows us to do some systematic, dispassionate analysis of, you know,  what political factors are shaping health outcomes? And I do think we're quite good at that, like, you know, we can do all. We can randomize control trial, any problem, you know. I think that when we're doing those things, you know, and as someone who actually has done randomized control trials in health governance, I think that, you know, tying our hands in these ways leads us to asking smaller questions. And I'm grateful for the political scientists who are not tying their hands in these ways and are asking bigger questions, maybe with a smaller geographic focus, or, you know, maybe not in this quote-systematic way, but still, they're doing research that's unbiased and meaningful, and I think that. So if I were to answer that question, I would say one thing that political science offers is a pluralism, a methodological pluralism, you know, in some places more than others, but I think that that methodological pluralism allows us to think about global health problems and Global Health Solutions in ways that are not limited.

Joseph Harris  17:53

Now you've also published work with researchers outside the discipline of political science, like Adia Benton. How does work from other disciplines inform your approach to research, and why has that been valuable to you? 

Kim Yi Dionne  18:05

I cannot imagine doing global health research without reading beyond political science. I mean, there just wouldn't be very much to read, frankly. But also, I think other disciplines, especially in the social sciences, have just advanced on this much more than political science. And so, you know, I guess one thing that I like about it is it means I'm perpetually a student, like I always have something to read  and that's nice because it feels like you're discovering things. And sometimes it's nice too, because even if you're reading in another discipline, you're actually seeing some parallels to your own and so it doesn't quite feel like work. Of course, it's also hard, because when anthropologists say political economy, it means something very different than when political scientists say political economy. And so, you know, there's some parts where it does feel like more work. And it's really hard, I think, to publish in global health, because you don't know who your readers will be: could they be political scientists, who are going to want one kind of thing from you, or could they be anthropologists, who are going to want a different thing from you? And so I think which is why I like collaboration. I think that collaboration is great because it means I've read the political science, my colleague has read the anthropology, and we can give each other shortcuts to really good literatures or really relevant literatures that can inform a piece. And so that, you know, the essay that I wrote with Adia Benton during the Ebola Outbreak in West Africa, I learned so much from writing that with her. And, you know, we wrote that in a compressed time, because that was a commentary that was, you know, they were trying to publish, you know, early in the Ebola Outbreak. So, you know, we were writing it in a compressed time and  so I felt like I got this very, very strong crash course and  these are the  fundamental things you need to read in you know, anthropology, plus that you haven't already been exposed to, and that that was great working with her.

Joseph Harris  20:07

Yeah, talk at little health politics workshops on money and medicine in Malawi, linking state health spending to health outcomes. Can you give our listeners a sense of what that project is about?

Kim Yi Dionne  20:17

Sure. So this is part of a bigger book project where I'm trying to understand how social exclusion, and especially that led by the state, can lead to negative health outcomes. And so in this particular talk, though, I'm just focusing on how much the state spends on health care, and Malawi is an interesting place to study that, because it's a case that has been really dependent on foreign aid and a lot of the foreign aid in Malawi actually goes towards health. And what I've seen over the years is a reliance on donors for health care. So to be sure, Malawi, the state government, they pay for health. Ordinary Malawians also like out of pocket, pay a lot to get health care, but the lion's share of funding is actually coming from donors, and so as a person who studies democracies, that's a problem, right? It's a problem if the main source of resources for this basic public provision, which is caring for the health of your people, is coming from an entity that is not elected, that cannot be held accountable, right? That's a real challenge. And if we care about democracy, if we care about accountability, what does it mean when decisions are made by people who can never be held to account? I don't want to minimize the work that practitioners are doing in countries like Malawi that don't have the domestic income to cover the costs of all of their healthcare needs. I want us to reimagine, though, why is it that a country like Malawi doesn't have sufficient income to be able to care for its citizens needs, you know, and  what is it that the international community has done in the past and in the present to yield this situation where they're not meeting their own needs. But also, you know, what does it mean for ordinary Malawians who are trying to navigate pretty sparse healthcare system? They can hold their government accountable, kind of, in some situations more than others, but at some point they're not even thinking the government is responsible for health. When the pandemic happened and when the COVID pandemic emerged, there was already a belief, I think, in a lot of Malawians minds, that, well, these kinds of issues donors take care of, and a lot of that had to do with the incredible donor response dates.

Joseph Harris  23:02

We're here with Kim Yi Dionne, political scientist from UC- Riverside. You're listening to the global health politics podcast.  I also understand you're in the early stages of work on a new book. What's that about, and how does that relate to your previous book, Doomed Interventions?

Kim Yi Dionne  23:40

So right now, the new project is tentatively titled "Pandemic Politics in Africa." So some things are similar in that, you know, I'm studying infectious disease, and I'm studying it in Africa, and I'm focused on the politics of how states and people respond to pandemics, and what that means for the trajectory of the pandemic. So I think in that sense,  it's somewhat similar to Doomed Interventions  and of course, I talk about HIV/AIDS in the book. It departs from the earlier book, because, I mean, there's a lot of things I think of, you know, in a first book that you have doubts about or questions about, and I've had the great fortune of people reading my book and feeling comfortable telling me some of the things that they weren't convinced by in Doomed Interventions and as many academics will tell you, well, maybe not many, but as some academics might admit, the first book you write is really the book you write to secure employment in the long term. This is the, you know, this is the book you write to try to earn tenure. And that was what it was for me. And so because of that, it's also under a time crunch, and, you know, and  you put out the book that you can in the time that you have. And I don't know, maybe it's just me. I'm not pleased with how Doomed Interventions ended up. And there's some things in it I wish could have been expanded or, you know, and  that's what I see with Pandemic Politics in Africa : it's that I don't have pressure. I can publish, I can write and publish this whenever I want. And because of that, I feel a freedom to be right, you know, and to take the time and to get it right. And  so the argument in the book is that socially exclusive states and societies are going to be less good at responding to pandemics, and that's because, you know from all of the research that we've learned about in global health about how othering and blame or even just framing disease, especially infectious disease, as being associated with a particular group, leads people to not seek healthcare in the same way as it would if we thought of a disease that affected everyone. And it also leads states to provide care in different ways, and especially when it comes to infectious diseases. You know,  we've learned a lot over the years about a care versus control approach by the state. And I think when there's when you are a socially exclusive state, you're much more likely to use control than to use care, because the kinds of people who tend to get sick are not the kinds of people you care about anyway. And so what you want to do is to contain the disease from spreading  and, you know, while in our minds, that seems logically effective, like, you know, cording things off so that they don't spread, actually, in practice, you know, we're social beings. But when the state does that to us, it leads us to not admit when we're sick, it leads us to, you know, and then to move in ways that put other people at risk, but also that can keep us from getting healthy. So that's kind of the  overview of what the argument is and I focus in particular. So I mentioned, I do talk about HIV/AIDS in the book, but I also focus on Ebola and COVID. And I think because, you know, in the US and in the West, when we think about Ebola, you know, it's this really gruesome illness,  and of course, that lends itself to othering and blame in ways that I think less gruesome diseases don't. But Ebola is also interesting because  it's a disease with a very short incubation period, and that makes it very different from HIV/AIDS. HIV can take eight to 12 years to manifest into AIDS, but Ebola is quick, and it's so quickly deadly, right? So I felt like there needed to be a comparison between types of infectious diseases, which I felt HIV/AIDS is is an easy enough disease to write a whole book about, but because of this kind of peculiarity of its in its natural history, it makes me wonder the extent to which we can generalize studies about HIV/AIDS to other infectious disease pandemics. And I think it's important for us to get more generalizable theories about the politics of disease response, because there's always going to be a new pandemic and, you know, and that's only, I think, going to be exacerbated by the negative effects of climate change, and so I would like to have a more generalizable theory about how these things operate.

Joseph Harris  29:09

Fascinating. I can't wait to read the next book. I want to pick up on something you just said, though, because I am a huge fan of Doomed Interventions. And of course, as you know, have invited you to speak in my class a number of times on this, and you've been very generous in engaging with them, but you mentioned that  you feel like there's some things you didn't get right, and I'd love to hear you.  Would you  just  reflect on that for a moment. What would you say about that? 

Kim Yi Dionne  29:37

So the big thing is, I had a whole chapter devoted to corruption. And if you've read Doomed Interventions, you know that I have this global to local supply chain explaining how AIDS interventions typically travel, that they're funded from donors outside of Africa. Through the national governments, and then through regional bodies associated with national governments, whether that's the Ministry of Health or the specific organization or agency within a country that's devoted to HIV/AIDS or even an international NGO's office. And then that trickles all the way down to the village or neighborhood level, if we're talking about cities, to a person who is navigating the AIDS pandemic and and whether that person is living with HIV/AIDS, or, you know, a person trying to keep themselves from getting infected with HIV/AIDS and implicit, it may be a little bit less than, like, more than implicit in the in the book is the idea that there's stuff that's getting siphoned off along this chain. And so there's, you know, two things that this global to local supply chain explain. One is a misalignment of priorities, which I think the book does a decent job of, but the corruption part, the siphoning off across each level of governance in this multi level governance chain, that part is not substantiated in the book. And so when I wrote it as a dissertation, my dissertation committee was like, "Nah, this is very compelling." And then when I wrote it as a book, same book workshop was like, "Well, is this really convincing?" And it was convincing to me, but I wasn't doing a good enough job convincing others. And so I pulled it from the book, and to me like, I still think that global to local supply chain is a helpful framework for understanding global health interventions. But, and I don't want people to get the wrong idea about what I think about corruption, like,  I've learned a lot about corruption from Léonce Ndikumana, who's an economist at UMass Amherst, where, you know, he's like, "Why are we always talking about the grabbing hand and not the helping hand?" So when I talk about corruption and African governments, I'm not talking about a low level bureaucrat who takes a bribe. That is, of course, corruption, but what I'm talking about is, you know, the Swiss banks that are keeping the deposits that, you know, corrupt high level officials are stealing from a government or from a program and depositing in their international bank accounts. So, and that I think I want to have a little bit of a better handle on in this book  is talking, you know, not specifically about corruption, but about the international and political economic structures that shape the way ordinary people view the world and how they engage in things, but also about how African states navigate funding opportunities, but also regulations about how they have to report on, you know, any activities that they do related to funding opportunities. So, you know, talking about that structure a bit more and as well as like, inequities in the global economy that shape people's opportunities and livelihoods. 

Joseph Harris  33:18

 So it sounds like really enriching the way that we conceptualize and understand corruption.

Kim Yi Dionne  33:23

Yes, well, building, I think, drawing from, you know, others who have done that for us. 

Joseph Harris  33:29

 Yeah, Ann Swidler, on the podcast, had another really interesting sort of take on that as well and look forward to seeing that work develop. So you've been very committed to work in the public space, having been editor at the Washington Post Monkey Cage and now editor in chief at the good authority. Congratulations! Why did you choose to get involved in that work, and why would you encourage others to do public facing work and policy oriented research?

Kim Yi Dionne  33:58

So,  I think a lot of it stems from being brought up in the public school system. So, you know, I had, I guess I would call it a blue collar upbringing, except that my parents didn't have steady work, so maybe that's more typical blue collar upbringings these days, but, and I never went  to private school, not for college, not for grad school. And then, you know, there's something about public education and knowledge being available to the public that I think is really important and I've always believe that. My work, I want to do work that matters, and it will only matter if the results, or, you know, the findings I have, are shared with people who can do something with them. And I think that's why scientific communication, public engagement, I think, that's why it's important to me. I do want to say I don't know that it's for everyone. I think, especially given, you know, some of the specific challenges that people of color, women face on the internet, in fact, like it's, you know, it can be harmful for some people, and depending on, you know, what kind of career you're in or pursuing, it can have its costs. So, you know, it's been great for me. And I, you know, more than writing about my own work, I love writing about other people's work, because, you know, I mean, I was a cheerleader in high school, and I really like, I feel like that's a core part of my identity, like I love cheering other people on. And when I read good work, I love talking about it. I love telling other people about it. You know, it's, I don't know, it's like, when you find a new TV show you love or a new book you've read, you know, you want to tell everyone about it. You know, the other night at dinner, someone was talking about Russia or the Soviet Union or the Cold War, I can't remember, and I was like, "Oh my God, have you read Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking?" Because it's this beautiful memoir about, you know, food and belonging and family and nationalism, and also, like weird Soviet politics and cool Soviet food, you know, over the years. And I feel that way about research, too, you know, I'll read a paper that's new to me, and I'll be so excited about it. And I think so much of academia is about being critical of work, right, to make it better. I mean, sometimes, for the sake of science, right, you're trying to advance our understanding in ways that,you know, criticism can help do. I think we go a bit too far sometimes, and I think it almost becomes blood sport, and that's the part of our job  I like the least.  I mean, of course, like when I write reviewer reports, referee reports for journals that ask me to review articles, or university presses that ask me to review books. Of course, you know, work sometimes doesn't meet the bar, and I say no, but I hate that the most. Like, that's the part of the job I hate the most, you know. So I always agonize over manuscripts that don't seem quite ready, because I'm like, "Oh, I see where they were going with this," like, you know, and I see promise in this and I hate saying no, you know. So then I take a long time, you know, the poor editors are just like, "Give us your thoughts now", you know, and I am just like, "No, I have to turn a path." Because, like, you know, all good work can be published like it just has to find the right home, and maybe it just has to do a few things. But I think criticism, it's not the part of the job I like. And so when I can do work like scientific communication, public engagement that highlights the good work that we've done, that feels a lot better to me.

Joseph Harris  38:10

 Well, I love it that it seems to me  that sensitivity that you share is one of the things that makes you a good editor. And also, I mean, that's also one of the things that I love most about doing this podcast. I mean, it is such a chance to cheer with you as you say, and really enjoy drawing out what is so great and insightful about other people's words, something I share. Do you foresee Global Health becoming a big focus at the good authority? Tell me a little bit more  and tell our listeners a little bit more about the good authority and where you see it?

Kim Yi Dionne  38:47

Sure, so you know, we had this when we had this long relationship with the Washington Post, I think we were there for eight years, nine years, almost publishing as the monkey cage. And when our contract ended with the post, you know, we thought about, you know, what were our next steps.  Did we just kind of close up shop, tie a little bow on it and congratulate ourselves on, you know, near decade of good work? Or do we try to partner with another media company, or do we go independent? And we ultimately decided to go independent, you know, which requires a lot of work, you know, building a brand new site and driving traffic to it, and, you know, getting people just aware of it. The mission is largely the same.  Our goal, good authority, is to bring political insights to a broader public. Excuse me,  to bring insights from political science to a broader public. That's our mission and that's very similar to what we did at the monkey cage. But it feels, you know, it feels a little more freeing to not be limited to 1000 words so we can go long if we want. It also feels a little more freeing to be fun and frivolous. So of course, like political science is serious, we do serious work, but we're also fun people. We post about cake and dogs and, you know, things that we like, you know, who doesn't love cake? I guess that people like pie, but I like pie and cake, so I let 1000 flowers bloom when it comes to desserts. You know, the thing about it is, when we were at the post, it just felt like a lot of work and not as much fun. And so one of the things I love about good authority is  it still feels like work, but it also feels like a lot more fun. We're a smaller team, and we publish fewer contributors, and that's just because of the bandwidth that we have as an independent site. And, you know,  when you wrote for us at the Washington Post and a few others, we  we had a lot more people writing about global health, and that was because, you know, we had a funder whose primary goal was to fund more scientifically oriented conversation about global health, hunger and poverty, and that gave us an opportunity to provide training to academics who wanted to do this kind of scientific communication but didn't know exactly how to write for a public audience. You know, right now, good authority, I think we have featured some limited pieces on global health. I think we could do more, but it's just right now, it's a matter of bandwidth, like, what do we have the capacity to edit and write about. You know, we haven't featured anything on monkey pox, and, you know, that's something that's happening in the world right now that I think deserves a lot more attention, especially given the inequities in international response to monkey pox, depending on who's facing the disease. And so, you know, which repeats like it's playing an old record. You know, it's repeating a thing we've heard before, but it's still happening. And I think, you know, we talk about that and what we can learn from previous bungles in the global health community to making sure that, you know, we're not repeating those mistakes. And I think that's the role of scientific communication or public engagement, you know, because our friends in the humanities would say the same thing, you know, there's a lot to be learned from history, and if we do our job informing the public. That's a great way to do it. But I'm also deeply concerned about public trust in science, and I was concerned before the Coronavirus emerged in 2020, but I'm more concerned now, and I feel like now more than ever, academics who have insights that should be shared with a broader public. We have many spaces for which they're making, they're trying to have their voices heard.

Joseph Harris  43:14

Another side project of yours is Ufahamu Africa, which is kind of on the leading podcast on African politics. What does Ufahamu mean, and how did that project come about?

Kim Yi Dionne  43:25

Sure, so Ufahamu  Africa is a podcast on life and politics on the continent, and Ufahamu is Ki Swahili for understanding. You mean, actually it can be translated a few different ways: understanding is one of them, consciousness is another. And the idea was we wanted ordinary people to have a better understanding of the continent, to not have their ideas about life and politics on the continent, to be informed by sub-par reporting by a Western journalist in a leading newspaper. I'm looking at you the New York Times, right. You know, back in the days of the Jeffrey Gettleman being our man in Africa, kind of reporting about Africa, you know, of course, I think those things have changed. Those things have gotten better. Abdi Latif is at the New York Times and writing excellent work in and about East Africa and so I, you know, I think that's improving, but  I'm still cognizant of the need for something that's in a digestible form for people. I think, especially people who don't live in Africa, to have a better understanding. And maybe, you know, they're not reading, maybe they don't have subscriptions to major newspapers, they're not following events as closely, but they're interested in Africa and or maybe they want to go beyond the headlines and know deeper what's happening. And that's where, you know, and that's where Ufa-Hamu Africa can provide some deeper takes on, you know, major events that are happening, or historical events that we should know more about.

Joseph Harris  45:11

What are some emerging scholars and also activists, practitioners that have caught your attention lately?

Kim Yi Dionne  45:19

 Um, well, actually, one of our non-resident fellows from Africa, Tacoma, Priscilla simpare. She was a guest in season one of the podcast when she was a student at Smith College, and then she came back as a non-resident fellow two seasons ago. And after that, she started a master's degree at Stanford University in a Master's in Science and Education. And she, you know, if anyone had listened to her episodes, she has a really compelling and fresh take on African Studies. And I appreciate the way she always makes me think differently about Africa and African Studies. And, you know, now she's just completed the Knight Hennessy fellowship at Stanford, and, you know, should be filing all of her paperwork to earn her graduate degree in the coming weeks and I'm excited to see what she's going to be doing in the future.  I really like what she produced. And, you know, she's, you know, because she's been in Silicon Valley, she's thinking about things related to technology and I find that really exciting. So, yeah, so I would say that, let me think, in global health, whose work am I? You know, I don't know that. I would not say an emerging scholar because he's been on the scene for a while. This is Alex Kentikelenis, you know, I've, been so impressed, I mean, really, since the Ebola pandemic. So this is 10 years ago now, the things he was writing in the public about the IMF, and, you know, the International Monetary Fund and their role in structural adjustment programs and how that shaped health systems trajectories in various poor countries. It's so phenomenal. And you know, his book with Thomas Stubbs, A Thousand Cuts, just, you know, this is, this was one of those books where I would keep telling people, "Oh my God, have you read this book?" And I think that's really important, because again, like I was saying earlier, about, you know, this new project that I'm working on, I want to be mindful about international political economic constraints, and reading A Thousand Cuts really helps me to keep that in the frame. And I think that kind of work  is really important, because for so long, I've focused on individual level behavior, and I just think that, you know, while that's important, we have to understand what's structuring that behavior, and not just, you know, their own governments or the society that they live in, but this kind of broader structure.

Joseph Harris  48:22

What are the most meaningful parts of the research process for you and do you feel that there are parts of the research process that just don't get enough attention, that we don't talk about? 

Kim Yi Dionne  48:34

Okay, so not meaningful, but something we don't pay enough attention to is how much research doesn't make it in the final product. And I say this mostly for anyone who's a researcher, especially early in your career, if you feel like you're hitting a lot of dead ends, so do we. We hit a lot of debt. I mean, I think you can get a little bit better at this. The longer you do it, you start to see a dead end coming. And, you know, cut ties and move like, go down a different path. So much of research is that, and I don't want people to get discouraged or to feel like they're not capable of doing research because they keep doing a lot of work for very little outcome. I'd say, you know, some of the most rewarding parts of research is, you know, writing. You know, I really like the first part where you like write the proposal, where you convince people that this is an important problem and that it should be studied. You know, writing the stories, the narratives about things. You know, I'm reading something about, you know, something that you wrote about a book that you're working on and what I love about it is how it opens with telling us a story. And so I think it's hard to find a story or a narrative that can illustrate a project's argument. Yeah, but when you find one, you know, that feels so good when you can write it. And even editing that you're like, "Oh, but I forgot when, you know, the person at the bus stop did this." That was also showing me the same, you know, a different angle about the same argument. And I don't know, one thing I've learned, I think, more recently, certainly not something I learned in my PhD program, was that narratives are compelling. So much of my PhD program was, you know, you really have to have rigorous quantitative analysis that systematic and is triangulated. But statistics don't compel people to do things, it's stories that do. And so how do we take the things we've learned and actually, like, turn it into a story. And so another thing I love about research is reading good research that tells stories that can serve not just as content for what I'm writing, but teaching me about style, for how to convey to people what my argument is and why the evidence should be compelling to them.

Joseph Harris  51:20

Are there any practices or habits that you found indispensable in the process of conducting research and writing?

Kim Yi Dionne  51:28

Yeah, I think trying to put yourself in the shoes of the people whose behavior you're trying to explain, right, thinking like that is really important. Like if you can't put yourself in their place and try to imagine like their choice options, and the constraints around those choice options, I think that's really important. Making relationships with people, and not in a in an expectation of reciprocity, but just in a way of furthering your understanding of, you know, how things work, you know, and being humble and being open to being wrong about things. You know, I think that's one of the reasons why I've been successful is because I'm not afraid to be wrong and I'm not afraid to share ideas I have, and to be told, "No, no, no, that's not how it goes. It goes like this," and to surround myself with people who, you know, are ready to tell me when I'm wrong. You know, not cruel people, of course, but, you know,

Joseph Harris  52:42

 A Team of Rivals, kind of.

Kim Yi Dionne  52:44

 Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like when you have a friend who will tell you have spinach in your teeth. It's true, but not like, in a rude way, like, "Oh dear, let's not go out in the public with that spinach in your teeth." You know, it's like,  and so that's why, you know, making relationships with people, and knowing who are the people that are going to tell you there's spinach in your teeth. And that works for research too. You know, who can, who feels like friends and family and can tell you like, "I get where you're going. I wonder if you might try it this way." Or,  "I can tell you're passionate about this project, but  I'm not there yet with you like I need more. You know, can you tell me something about this?" Or, "you know, what other things are you thinking about that can go? " You know, I think people who can be honest with you in that way and kind, you know, not the brutally honest stuff, like  you know, if it has to be brutal, I don't want it, you know, like, but, you know, a rigorous honesty. That's kind, I like that.

Joseph Harris  52:54

Those are the best kinds of friends.  This goes back to the sensitivity, I think, that we talked about. It's a really lovely through line and  I think it's maybe under appreciated. I mean, we all appreciate it, right? But, yeah, I think we don't talk about it. 

Kim Yi Dionne  54:08

We don't reward it also, you know.

Joseph Harris  54:11

 It's implicitly there, I mean, in reviewer too,  in discussion about that. Last question for you, if you could give first year PhD students doing work on global health one piece of advice, what would it be? 

Kim Yi Dionne  54:25

 Go to the global health politics workshop online, wherever you are in the world. I'm serious, and I talked about this, you know, I've talked about this a lot. You know, in fact, I gave this explicit advice to a first year graduate student in our program. You know, he has this projects, really neat project on HIV/AIDS in Africa, and, you know, using these really sophisticated synthetic control methods. And, you know, I said, "you know, I think it would really benefit you to hear about global health - not just from political scientists." Maybe your bibliography has a lot of political scientists, and that's great. I mean, there's political scientists who write about global health and HIV/AIDS, and there are people in other disciplines who do it too. And one of the things I like about the global health politics workshop is that it brings a range of people in from different disciplines, but also  it's kind and fun. And, you know, if you're zooming in, you know, you're not just some faceless person in the ether; you know, there's this great little, it's almost like an antechamber  where in the beginning, you kind of go into your little breakout rooms and meet other people. You know, they could be graduate students, they could be faculty, they could be postdocs, they could be practitioners, right, where you just get to say hello and practice saying, you know, talking about the things you're interested in. And everyone needs practice doing that. And and  it's a kind place to be, and there's really cool, important research happening in that space. And so I think, you know, doing that is great, because you learn about research, you learn about research outside of your disciplinary area, but you also make friends, and you know those relationships can be helpful to you. Or even just like knowing, seeing someone who's successful, and then knowing, "I've got to look at their CV after this zoom is over, because I need to see, what are the fellowships that they've gotten or tried to get, you know, what are the things that they're doing?" Because they're a great model for what I want to be, you know, three years from now, or six years from now and that's helpful, because you might not otherwise see those models, especially if you're studying global health.

Joseph Harris  56:47

You've been listening to Kim Yi Dionne here on the Global Health politics podcast. She is the author of the wonderful book Doomed Interventions and so many other wonderful articles. If you haven't read her book or articles, I admit you to check them out will be better for having done so. Kim, it's been such a pleasure! Thank you so much for joining us!

Kim Yi Dionne  57:07

Thanks Jeff for having me on the show. Bye!