Inspired by the 2021 BMJ Global Health Editorial by Atkinset alon global health (GH) teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of GH students and recent graduates from around the world convened to discuss our experiences in GH education during multiple global crises. Through weekly meetings over the course of several months, we reflected on the impact the COVID-19 pandemic and broader systemic inequities and injustices in GH education and practice have had on us over the past 2 years. Despite our geographical and disciplinary diversity, our collective experience suggests that while the pandemic provided an opportunity for changing GH education, that opportunity was not seized by most of our institutions. In light of the mounting health crises that loom over our generation, emerging GH professionals have a unique role in critiquing, deconstructing and reconstructing GH education to better address the needs of our time. By using our experiences learning GH during the pandemic as an entry point, and by using this collective as an incubator for dialogue and re-imagination, we offer our insights outlining successes and barriers we have faced with GH and its education and training. Furthermore, we identify autonomous collectives as a potential viable alternative to encourage pluriversality of knowledge and action systems and to move beyond Western universalism that frames most of traditional academia.

Global Health is experiencing a moment of reckoning over the field’s legacy and current structuring in a world facing multiple, intersecting challenges to health. While “decolonization” has emerged as the dominant frame to imagine change in the field, what the concept refers to and entails has become increasingly unclear. Despite warnings, the concept is now being used by elite Global North institutions and organization to imagine their reformation. In this article, I attempt to provide clarity to the issue of conceptualizing change in Global Health. By first outlining a brief history of decolonial thought and then exploring the current state of the decolonizing global health literature, I show a profound disjuncture between popularized calls for decolonization in Global Health and other theorizations of the term. I then argue that the diluting of “decolonization” into a depoliticized vision of reforming the inherently colonial and capitalistic institutions and organizations of Global Health is an example of “elite capture”—the coopting and reconfiguration of radical, liberatory theories and concepts then used by elites for their own gain. Showing how this elite capture has facilitated harm within the field and beyond, I conclude by calling for resistance to elite capture in all its forms.