Danielle Taana Smith
Danielle Taana Smith is a Professor in the Department of African American Studies and Professor of Sociology (courtesy) in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her research engages in global policy issues with an overarching goal of improving the social and economic environment for all, especially those at the margins of our society.
An analysis of the European Union’s systematic externalization of migration management onto African states, showing how externalization constitutes a neocolonial project rooted in a governmentality of unease. Drawing on cases from Libya to Mauritania, it critiques EU aid conditionality and securitization discourse, and advocates for Pan African institutional alternatives centered on human security.
Tagged under Labour & Political Economy
Global health disparities between poor and wealthy populations do not reflect merely quantitative differences in access to resources, rather poverty produces qualitatively distinct patterns of cognition, disease, and life expectancy. Drawing on epidemiology, developmental psychology, and political economy, Danielle argues that prolonged material deprivation does not simply reduce the quantity of health outcomes; it restructures the biological, psychological, and social conditions of human life for the impoverished in ways that are categorically distinct from those experienced by affluent populations.
Tagged under Food, Health & Wellbeing
A critique of the neoliberal framework inducing health worker migration. Brain drain from Africa is an extractive process that subsidizes affluent nations at the cost of African lives. Systemic inequities and geopolitical crises coerce migration and undermine the health security of the African continent. The article calls for a radical redesign of the global health market.
Tagged under Labour & Political Economy
A critique of the global pharmaceutical industry. The current global health model prioritizes private profit over human life. Viral sovereignty and struggles for the protection of life and health against biocapitalism are central components of reparative justice and resistance.
Tagged under Food, Health & Wellbeing