Seye Abimbola: On the Foreign Gaze
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Seye Abimbola: On the Foreign Gaze
Seye Abimbola wants us to stop mistaking prestige for insight – and inclusion for equity.
At a bustling restaurant tucked into a leafy corner of the University of Sydney, Associate Professor Seye Abimbola leans forward and orders coffee without glancing at the menu. Although his name seems to be everywhere right now – thanks to the quiet storm stirred by his book The Foreign Gaze – the sandstone walls of Australia’s oldest university remain his productive bubble.
Tall, disarmingly candid, and known as much for his thoughtfulness as his deep, bellowing laugh, Abimbola is a rare kind of academic. After training as a doctor in Nigeria and working as a researcher in the Nigerian government, he went on to become the founding Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Global Health while earning his PhD in Sydney. Under his watch, it became a platform for fearless scholarship – one unafraid to publish sharp truths, inviting writers to speak without trimming their words to suit power.
Since the release of The Foreign Gaze, which started as an essay published in the journal, the book has travelled through boardrooms and conference halls, into the hands of CEOs, community organisers, researchers and frontline practitioners alike. It has struck a chord by asking discomforting questions: Who gets to define what counts as knowledge? Whose voices are listened to – and whose are left out?
“I wrote the book as a hug that pinches,” he tells me, once we’ve relocated to his office, escaping the rain and rising lunchtime din. “I wanted people to feel recognised, but also unsettled.”
It’s easy to see why his ideas have found their moment. In a field crowded with declarations about equity, few thinkers have pressed so hard, and so elegantly, on the contradictions that define global health. In this conversation, we talk about who gets to speak, who is heard, and how chasing prestige can pull research away from the people it should serve. This is a conversation about local knowledge, power, and the courage it takes to bring them together.
Distance, gaze, and the limits of knowing
The Foreign Gaze
At the heart of Seye’s critique is what he calls the foreign gaze – a concept that draws attention to how knowledge, especially from the global south, is shaped by the power of distant audiences.
The foreign gaze draws attention to how knowledge is shaped by the power of distant audiences.
“The foreign gaze has two words that require definition,” he says, settling into his chair. “Gaze is perhaps the more important of those two. The job that gaze is doing in that formulation refers to the power that one’s audience…the power that they wield on how one sees, how one chooses to see, even how one theorises,” he tells me. “That audience is a co-producer…that person on your shoulder, present in your meaning making.”
Epistemic Injustice
He describes the enduring influence of “epistemic injustice” – where knowledge from the global south is systemically undervalued unless it passes through northern validation systems.
The idea of “foreign,” he clarifies, is not merely about geography. “Foreign is also about distance – social, conceptual, it can be gendered. When I’m trying to explain the foreign gaze, sometimes I describe it as the distance that exists, say, between men and women. If women were analysing, describing, discussing issues that pertain to women, and they have to address themselves to an audience of men, what does that do to their meaning making?”
In a geographical sense, foreignness might mean doing research in a rural Nigerian community for an audience in London,” he explains. “But it is also about power – the kind that distances people. That foreign audience might be a powerful policymaker, a set of academics, or a philanthropist. The question is always: who is looking, from where, and what gets distorted in the process?”
These dynamics leave a deep imprint, particularly in fields like global health, where agendas are often shaped by institutions headquartered thousands of miles from the communities they aim to serve. For decades, women’s health initiatives in low- and middle-income countries have been influenced – if not directed – by donors, research institutions multilateral agencies, governments, and NGOs based in global capitals. The risk, as Seye notes, is that actors may speak to language of gender equality and women’s rights, but unconsciously reproduce the very hierarchies they seek to dismantle. This is especially true, he explains, when the goal is to make knowledge travel.
“[Toni Morrison] talked about how white feminists could fight for rights because African American women were at home, looking after their children."
He returns to Toni Morrison’s critique of the women’s movement in the 1970s. “She talked about how white feminists could fight for rights because African American women were at home, looking after their children. And those women's aspirations were hardly mentioned.”
“I think about that a lot,” he says, “the class and race blind spots that persist in our movements.”
A movement that claims to fight for justice can ignore the contributions, realities, and aspirations of those with less power, even as it claims to speak for them.
Knowledge as currency, audience as gatekeeper
Who is knowledge for?
Seye traces a recurring pattern: research and knowledge production are often directed outward, toward foreign power centres. I recall from his book a 1900s study on sanitation and women’s health priorities in Lagos, Nigeria – published in an American journal.
The logic persists today. Publishing in elite journals remains the gold standard for academic success, even if the intended audiences – local ministries, district health officers, women’s groups – are in close proximity to where research is undertaken. “We’ve been taught that the place to publish your work is other places. The conversation ought to be internal. I’m looking at the research that my friends and colleagues do in public health, in Nigeria for example. I find myself asking “but the district health department is there. The Ministry of Health is thirty minutes away. Why are you not trying to answer their questions? Why are you trying to impress an Editor in London?”.
The consequences he argues, are significant. “We don’t know how to quantify the loss that is engendered by this. We like to talk about lives saved and saving lives. I’m always asking: How many people are dying because we misorient the purpose and point of our work?”
“I’m always asking: How many people are dying because we misorient the purpose and point of our work.”
He pauses, then add: “While that is bad, what is even worse is when researchers start to believe in the limited expectations of the distant and powerful foreign audience. That’s not possible. Let’s not go there. It’s not going to work. It’s not going to land.
You find yourself celebrating non-wins. You stop asking hard questions. You stop pushing. In gender equality efforts, and in fact any change effort, we have to be deeply conscious of that”.
From Geneva to the grassroots: rethinking the path to reform
The limits of global forums
If research should serve people, not prestige, the same must be true of participation. Meetings, forums, and committees promise to give people a voice in decisions that shape their lives. But as Seye points out, a platform alone doesn’t mean power is shared - or that voices, particularly those of women at the margins, are truly heard. It matters much more who the platform was designed for. “Who connects there? And what power do they have when they are present?” he asks.
Whether it’s a United Nations treaty body's system of reviewing countries’ human rights track record, or a donor roundtable on women’s health, these spaces often mirror the same power imbalances they claim to fix. “Sometimes you’re on that platform, you still find this unevenness…the language on it is academic. Advocates find that they can’t speak or are forced to translate their realities into language that satisfies distant decision-makers”.
He also makes the point that within global platforms, local realities can be diluted by the logic of international diplomacy – flattened into language that meets global norms but loses local urgency.
That’s why, Seye argues, global institutions must be seen as reference points, not as replacements for community-driven platforms. “The more proximate you are to people’s lived realities, and the more embedded you are, the less distanced by class you are, the more you see. The higher you go, or the further away from communities you go, the higher your propensity to not be very useful.”
“The more proximate you are to people’s lived realities, and the more embedded you are, the less distanced by class you are, the more you see. The higher you go…the higher your propensity to not be very useful.”
He also urges caution when global attention suddenly turns to issues that have long existed and have been the subject of decades of local advocacy. “Even when people in those global spaces complain about what is happening today, the question on my mind is often: but it is not new. It is not new. Why is it now that you are unsettled by it?”.
Yet Seye doesn’t reject these spaces. He believes they can work - if we are willing to reimagine how we use them. They need to become places where real conversations happen, where women and those closest to the issues guide decisions and hold power to account.
Learning to see: legitimacy, discomfort, and the next generation
I ask Seye what kind of impact he hopes his work will have. There’s already been a strong response to The Foreign Gaze – some readers are rethinking their practice from the ground up. Others, especially those more invested in the status quo, may find it more difficult.
He describes his approach as a kind of soft provocation. “I was aiming for a message that pulls people in – even if it pinches you after it hugs you. It gives you a jab, but it hugs you first! So depending on when the jab lands, your sense of what just happened might shift. But that’s the point.”
Inspiring the next generation
The book is primarily for younger scholars, especially those in the global south. “The message is: resist the socialisation into unjust and unfair practices. The field is set up in a way that, if you follow the defaults, you will end up reproducing epistemic injustice. My goal is to alert people early on – before the logic becomes too familiar to question.”
He’s not only writing for those early in their career. “For those further along in their careers, it might be more painful to confront. But even then, I hope they can see it – and at the very least, help those coming after them to feel that discomfort.”
Seyes' formative years
Seye also writes for people like himself – those who grew up in environments that encouraged him to value Euro-American knowledge systems while discounting local knowledge and realities, to internalise the idea that what is taught in European and North American institutions is the gold standard. He hopes the book can enter the minds of those readers and “vaccinate them against these things.”
That sense of moral clarity runs deep. He traces his own sensitivity to power back to his youth in Nigeria, growing up under successive military regimes. “At twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, my heroes were people who had been jailed, exiled, or killed for speaking out. I understood very early that to be a human being is to fight.”
“At twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, my heroes were people who had been jailed, exiled, or killed for speaking out. I understood very early that to be a human being is to fight.”
“Power wasn’t abstract. It was everywhere. You weren’t shielded from it, whether that’s power from the military government, its ability to keep people quiet, and to quash any potential opposition, the doctrine of the church, where my mother was a very active member, the authority of elders. I was a student of power from very early on.”
There’s a steadiness to his vision – driven by a long memory and a deeper hope. The kind that doesn’t just demand better answers, but better questions. The kind that trusts the next generation to keep pushing, reshaping, resisting. And, like him, to see power clearly.
As I finish writing up Seye’s interview, I think of Misimi Kakoti, an India-based qualitative researcher, and her reflections on The Foreign Gaze in a recent blog. Misimi describes how her voice changed while leading a project on equitable partnerships at a global health institute headquartered in the global north. She quotes the book. “The foreign gaze can make a local expert write like an expatriate…This phenomenon can also corrupt the local expert’s own sense of reality.” Reflecting on these words Misimi writes, “When I would visit my hometown, I was not the same person criticising a local politician’s apathy toward water shortage…I was watching and making sense of their actions from a distance with a softened benevolent critique playing in my mind.” Reading Seye’s words, she finally found language for what she had lived.
Image credit: Obinna Okerekeocha 'Okotie Eboh Street, Lagos, Nigeria'