Global Public Health

Reimagining Global Health Education from an Interconnected World

Global health education has an important role in preparing public health professionals to work across diverse sociocultural, political, and economic contexts. Yet developing global health competence requires more than acquiring knowledge about health systems or populations in other settings. It requires learners to critically examine power, positionality, culture, ethics, and the relationships through which knowledge is produced and shared. Cross-cultural learning can create opportunities for students, educators, researchers, and communities to learn with and from one another, while connecting global processes to local public health challenges. This article collection explores how pedagogical approaches can foster cultural humility, critical self-reflection, ethical engagement, systems thinking, and locally responsive action. Drawing on emerging approaches to critical, community-engaged, and decolonizing pedagogy, the issue will examine how global health education can move beyond unidirectional models of knowledge transfer toward more reciprocal forms of learning. We invite conceptual and empirical scholarship that considers how these approaches can transform public health education, research, and practice across diverse settings.

The complexities that contextual global health systems require a nuance pedagogical toolkit for emerging scholars. Preparing public health professionals for an interconnected world requires more than technical knowledge. It requires the ability to critically reflect on one’s own positionality, engage respectfully across cultural and social contexts, recognize power and inequity, work collaboratively with communities, and adapt knowledge to local realities. Cross-cultural learning provides an important space for developing these capacities while challenging assumptions about whose knowledge counts as expertise and how public health problems should be defined and addressed. It also creates opportunities to connect local experiences with global systems and processes, recognizing that learning can flow in multiple directions. This article collection will explore how education can foster reciprocal, ethical, and contextually grounded approaches to global public health, and how these approaches can better prepare learners to work across difference, complexity, and changing social and political environments.

We invite conceptual, empirical, methodological, and practice-based contributions exploring how global health is taught and learned across contexts. Potential topics include:

• Critical and decolonial pedagogies: How can critical, reflective, participatory, and transformative pedagogies reshape global health education?
• Learning with and from communities: How can communities become co-educators and knowledge holders rather than sites of learning or intervention?
• Local knowledge and epistemic justice: How can Indigenous, community, and locally generated knowledge challenge dominant understandings of global health?
• Global health, locally taught: How can global processes and inequities be taught through local histories, health systems, and public health challenges?
• Experiential learning: What makes study abroad, internships, field placements, and service-learning reciprocal, ethical, and transformative?
• Competencies across contexts: How should global health competencies (e.g., communication, collaboration, cultural humility, and evidence-informed practice) be adapted to context?
• AI and the future of learning: How can educators integrate AI into global health curricula while preparing learners to critically evaluate AI-generated knowledge, recognize bias, and use emerging technologies ethically and equitably across diverse contexts?
• The infrastructure of global learning: How are funding, institutional partnerships, mobility, and student visa policies shaping who can participate in global health education?

Keywords: Global health education, Decolonizing and critical pedagogy, Community-engaged learning, Global health competencies, Experimental learning

Dr. Jonathan Garcia is Associate Professor and Public Health Graduate Program Director at Oregon State University. His research on transformative, critical pedagogy has focused on developing approaches to systemic mentorship, reciprocal relationship building, and ripple effect mapping. He has conducted research and developed pedagogical tools in collaboration with community organizations in Brazil, Peru, India, and South Africa.

All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo desk assessment and peer review if they can pass the desk assessments as part of our standard editorial process; the Guest Advisor for this Collection will not be handling the manuscripts (unless they are an Editorial Board member).

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 31 July 2027.

Please contact Saniya Qureshi at saniya.qureshi@taylorandfrancis.com  with any queries and discount codes regarding this Article Collection.