Bio
Dr. Emma Joanna Lengle is a physician and social medicine scholar who studies how urban governance and welfare universalism shape health inequities in Nordic welfare states. She received her MD from the University of Oslo and an MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and is currently completing a PhD in social medicine at the University of Oslo’s Department of Community Medicine and Global Health. Since 2024, she has been a visiting graduate student in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Her dissertation, The Politics of Health Inequities: Welfare Universalism and Municipal Governance in Oslo draws on fourteen months of fieldwork in the city government. She examines how welfare universalism and institutional whiteness shape the definition and governance of “social inequality in health,” and how civil servants and local politicians use public health strategies, legal frameworks, and budgetary tools both to reproduce existing hierarchies and to imagine, in modest but tangible ways, more equitable urban futures. Rather than treating Nordic welfare states simply as models to emulate, she uses the “Nordic paradox” of high averages and persistent gradients to probe the limits and possibilities of universalism as a route to health equity.
Dr. Lengle has been deeply involved in academic and public debate on policymaking for health equity. In 2022, she joined an international team of health equity researchers led by the Center for Global Health Inequalities Research to investigate social inequality in global COVID‑19 mortality and co‑founded the University of Oslo Working Group on Racism, Discrimination, and Health. She serves as a commissioner on the second Lancet–University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health, and in 2025 she co‑hosted the inaugural European Conference on Social Medicine.
Her public and institutional engagements are closely linked to her research on the politics of health and inequality. She co‑founded the network Doctors in Solidarity with Palestinian Healthcare Workers and has been a leading voice at the University of Oslo for ethical procurement practices and for an institutional academic boycott of Israeli universities as outlined by PACBI. Through these roles, she traces how institutional whiteness and transnational solidarity struggles shape what is rendered visible, governable, and tolerable in the name of “health for all.”
Her essays, articles, and op‑eds have appeared in venues including The Lancet, The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, and major Norwegian newspapers, where she writes on racism and health, democratic governance in universities, and transnational struggles for health justice.
Academic interests
Dr. Lengle’s research sits at the intersection of medical and political anthropology and social medicine, with a particular focus on questions that arise in the development and implementation of public policy aiming to ameliorate urban health disparities. She is broadly interested in the power of ideas, discourses, and institutions in shaping urban policy approaches, and in how welfare universalism both opens and limits what kinds of change are thinkable in Nordic welfare states. Her work speaks to medical anthropology, social medicine, and the anthropology of the state.
Her work engages:
Urban public health and social inequality in health
– Health gradients and “Nordic paradox” dynamics in Oslo and other welfare cities
– How municipal public health strategies translate social determinants frameworks into local regulatory, budgetary, and planning instruments
– How knowledge of social determination travels, or fails to travel, into city‑level policymaking and implementation
Welfare universalism, colorblind universalism, and institutional whiteness
– How categories such as alle, likeverdig fordeling, “vulnerable groups,” and “priority areas” are mobilized in policy discourse and strategy documents, and how they construct policy populations
– The use of geography and socioeconomic status as proxies for more fraught axes such as race, ethnicity, disability, and migration, and the consequences of “no data, no problem / problematic data, big problem” dynamics in health equity work
– Institutional whiteness in Nordic welfare states and the ways in which colorblind universalist arrangements simultaneously reduce and reproduce social inequalities in health
Anthropology of policy and the state
– How “public health” and “social inequality in health” are defined, measured, and made administratively legible in municipal governance
– The municipal “toolkit” of legal frameworks, the income system, political–bureaucratic architectures, budgetary instruments, and evaluation devices, and how these tools both enable and constrain attempts to address social inequality in health
– Ethnographic approaches to local government, including “studying up, sideways, and across” in relatively flat but deeply structured welfare bureaucracies
Prefiguration, utopia, and universalist longings inside the state
– Strategy‑making as a site of universalist longings and mundane utopianism within welfare institutions: how civil servants and politicians use public health strategies to imagine and, in small ways, enact alternative configurations of life in the city
– How civil servants and politicians navigate the double‑edged nature of universalism, oscillating between reformist and more transformative horizons for health equity
– How policy visions of a “greener, warmer, more creative city, with space for everyone” encode particular dreams and nightmares, and whose desires and life chances are organized within these universalist projects
Across these themes, her scholarship asks academics and policymakers to take seriously how policymaking processes themselves reflect and reproduce social inequality, and to attend to the institutional and imaginative work required to transform them in pursuit of more equitable futures.
Teaching
Dr. Lengle has taught a variety of social medicine and medical humanities seminars at the University of Oslo and Harvard University. She is particularly inspired by teaching opportunities that engage questions of health justice, liberatory medical practice, racism and discrimination in health systems, and equitable public policy, and she brings her ethnographic work on welfare universalism and urban health governance into the classroom across medical, public health, and undergraduate curricula.
- Main advisor for MED5095 medical student thesis, Social Determinants of Health and the Immigrant Population in Oslo, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo (2026).
- Essentials of the Profession, Core curriculum for first year medical students at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
- Who Lives, Who Dies: Reimagining Global Health, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
- Medical Anthropology: Advanced Topics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
- Foundations of Bioethics, Core curriculum for the MSc in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
- Who Lives, Who Dies: Medicine and Society, Harvard Summer School, Harvard University
- Preventative medicine, health promotion and public health, Required course for MD specialization in community medicine, Norwegian Medical Association
- Education for Sustainable Health, Honors certificate for master's students, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
- Social inequality in health seminar, Core curriculum for first year medical students, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
- Obesity and climate in a global perspective seminar, Core curriculum for first year medical students, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
- Dialogue with a patient with substance addiction seminar, Core curriculum for fourth year medical students, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
- Acute and chronic health conditions among patients with substance addiction seminar, Core curriculum for fourth year medical students, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
Background
- 2024 - ongoing: Visiting scholar, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
- Spring 2026: Tutor, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
- Fall and Spring 2025: Teaching fellow, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
- Fall 2024: Facilitated learning group leader, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
- 2023-2024: Klassekampen writing academy
- 2022 - ongoing: PhD candidate, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
- 2022: Master of Public Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University
- Spring 2022: Project coordinator, Physicians for Human Rights
- 2021: MD, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
- 2020 - ongoing: Teaching fellow, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo
- 2020-2021: Medical student with authorization, Oslo Public Emergency Care Ward
- 2020: MD/PhD track in medical genetics, Oslo University Hospital
- Fall 2019: Intern, UNICEFs Regional Office for the Middle East and North Africa, Amman, Jordan
- Spring 2019: OB/GYN and community pediatrics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Awards & invited keynotes
The Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research BIBSYS Conference Keynote 2026
Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment Annual General Meeting Keynote Panel 2025
Norwegian Financial Times (Dagens Næringsliv) Guiding Star (Ledestjerne) 2025
Aker Scholarship 2021-2022
Center for Sustainable Healthcare Education Stipend for the podcast Folkefeber 2020
Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs UN internship scholarship 2019
Appointments & networks
- University board member, University of Oslo 2025-2026
- Organizing committee member, European Conference on Social Medicine 2025
- Commissioner, Lancet Commission on Global Governance for Health 2023-ongoing
- Member, Working Group on Racism, Discrimination, and Health 2023-ongoing
- National chair, Norwegian Medical Students' Humanitarian Campaign 2016-2018
- Board member, University of Oslo Medical Student Society 2015-2016
- Board member, Oslo Doctor's Association 2015-2016
- Chair, Norwegian Medical Students' Association Oslo 2015-2016
- Board member, Norwegian Medical Students' Association Oslo 2014-2015
Recent media dissemination
- Another ‘no’ to an academic boycott of Israel at UiO (Khrono, 2026)
- Academic boycott (Universitas, 2026)
- Freedom with responsibility (Khrono, 2026)
- UiO board kept Israel discussion secret (Khrono, 2025)
- Decision on boycott postponed (Universitas, 2025)
- Campaigned by email and got Israel decision postponed (Khrono, 2025)
- Trump's attacks on health and research (Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, 2025)
- Guiding Star (Dagens Næringsliv, 2025)
- Norwegian researcher at Harvard: - What's happening now is life-or-death (VG, 2025)
- "Trump's attacks affect the whole world" (Science Norway, 2025)
- Norwegian researcher advocates for resistance to Trump in the Lancet (Dagens medisin, 2025)
- Let's revive university democracy at UiO – together! (Klassekampen, 2025)
- Nyhetsmorgen April 23rd news interview (NRK, 2025)
- Dagsnytt 18 April 15th news interview (NRK, 2025)
- Dagsnytt 18 March 31st news interview (NRK, 2025)
- Anti-racism and inclusion - two sides of the same coin (Dagens medisin, 2025)
- Racism is a health issue (Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, 2024)
- Back to student democracy (Klassekampen, 2024)
- Let the medical students from Gaza into Norway (Aftenposten, 2024)
- Ethical procurement routines are a duty, UiO must change its practice (UNIFORUM, 2024)
- An acute lack of university democracy (Klassekampen, 2024)
- The Norwegian Medical Association must do more for Gaza (Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, 2024)
- Our responsibility as healthcare personnel (Klassekampen, 2023)
- Physician petition for the civilian population in Gaza (Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, 2023)
Conference presentations
European Association of Social Anthropology Conference, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland (July 2026) co-convening the panel Institutional Whiteness: Ethnographies of State Practices across Europe and presenting the paper Colorblind universalism: The everyday workings of institutional whiteness in the City of Oslo's public health governance
Conference of the Society for Humanities, Social Science, and Medicine, University of California San Francisco, USA (April 2026) with the paper Universalism, inclusion and difference in the City of Oslo’s policy imaginary
EASA Anthropologies of the State Conference, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (October 2025) with the paper A stable ship in shifting waters: Exploring the (im)mutability of state capacities in Norwegian local government
European Conference on Social Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway (June 2025) with the paper The desire for being otherwise: Futures of urban health (in)equity and the City of Oslo's utopian impulse
European Association of Social Anthropology Conference, University of Barcelona, Spain (July 2024) with the paper Urban public health: a missing past, an inconvenient present and an imminent future
Critical Europe Studies Conference, London School of Economics, UK (February 2024) with the paper Defining social inequality as a public health issue: Municipal bureaucrats, urban planning, and political narratives of health inequality in Oslo
Trusting the State Workshop, University of Liège, Belgium (September 2023) with the paper Axes of Mistrust in Municipal Public Health Planning
Future States Conference, European Anthropology of the State Network, Rīgas Stradiņa universitāte, Latvia (August 2023) with the paper Making Social Inequality Work in Norwegian Health Policy
Association for Medical Humanities Annual Conference, University College London, UK (July 2023) with the paper Democratic citizenship and social inequality in Norwegian public health policy