The two projects, "Risk, future narratives and sustainability" and "Global Health, Sustainable Development and Individual Responsibility" are both project initiated by SHE.
-This has a huge impact for SHE, says Eivind Engebretsen, chairman in SHE. - We are so happy to build international student networks related to health and sustainable healthcare education.
The projects will run from 1st January 2023 to 30th June 2023. The thematic areas addressed by the Interdisciplinary Thematic Research Network are climate, democracy, and global health.
About the projects:
1. Global Health, Sustainable Development and Individual Responsibility
The project will examine the under-explored question of responsibility in relation to the promises and goals of sustainability with focus on the younger generation. Sustainability is often hailed as providing a blueprint for how we can address global risks and challenges, such as those relating to climate change, declining biodiversity and global health inequities, as evident in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, sustainability goals have been criticised for being hollow and mainly promissory.
There is also the suspicion that sustainability may not be enough for the wholesale changes that are required: what should we sustain? A critical perspective is thus required that studies and questions different meanings of sustainability and the sometimes-conflicting narratives that are associated with them. Focusing on the moral imperative of forward-looking responsibility in relation to sustainability policies and initiatives, the project will critically interrogate the notions of sustainability and sustainable goals, and consider what responsibility for ensuring sustainable outcomes involves.
Students on future narratives
Central to this endeavour are the perspectives of young people, given this generation’s importance as stakeholders, and the fact that they are inheriting problems of sustainability and do not have ready access to systems of accountability. We will invite students associated with Studenterhus Aarhus, Nachhaltigkeitsbüro at HU-Berlin and the Student Parliament at Oslo University to an online workshop to draft narratives that describe their visions and anxieties regarding the future and frame their notion of responsibility. To supply context and inspiration for their discussions and creative processes, two invited speakers will present for the students, and the PIs will provide further input from the Oslo Medical Corpus and share examples of narratives from fiction and institutional discourses. These sources will provide the students with a platform for collaborative analysis of the different meanings and uses of sustainability and responsibility, and support the production of the students’ own narratives about sustainability and responsibility, leading to new critical insights – and, most likely, new questions.
Our Team
Aarhus University
PI (main applicant) – Antoinette Fage-Butler, Associate Professor, Dept. of English, School of Communication and Culture.
University of Oslo
PI – Eivind Engebretsen, Professor of Medical Humanities, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education.
PI – Mona Baker, Affiliate Professor, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education.
Humboldt University of Berlin
PI – Anne Enderwitz, Professor, Department of English and American Studies.
2. Risk, future narratives and sustainability
We are delighted to announce that our Circle U. team of researchers from the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), University of Oslo, University of Belgrade, and Kings College London has been awarded funding for an Interdisciplinary Thematic Research Network on the topic of "Global Health, Sustainable Development and Individual Responsibility: contradictory or complementary concepts?"
The tension between individual responsibility and global challenges is key to the three Circle U. Knowledge Hubs (Democracy, Climate and/or Global Health). Health and climate are global issues; it is not possible to address the outbreak of pandemics or floods in one part of the globe and ignore similar events elsewhere. While addressing such issues effectively clearly requires international collaboration, the solutions are often represented as a matter of individual responsibility.
Individual responsibility and global problems
The assumption is that if we all play our individual part, global problems will be resolved. But what is an ‘individual’ in today’s globalized, society? And what do we mean by ‘global’ health? The meanings of ‘global’ and ‘individual’, and their relationship with concepts such as ‘public’, ‘private’ and ‘personal’, have changed over time. Despite, or perhaps because of the proliferation of fields in which they have become key concepts, such terms remain vague and inadequately conceptualized, thus posing an obstacle to fruitful interdisciplinary research.
Our ITRN has a radical agenda, in the sense that it sets out to examine the conceptual roots of the tension between the ‘individual’ and the ‘global’, to understand what such concepts mean for the different stakeholders and what are the impact of such choices. The aim is to map the relationship between the individual and the global, taking global health and sustainable development as a point of departure.
Link to Oslo Medical Corpus
A number of authors have critiqued the lack of priority accorded to the role of language in negotiating the sustainability agenda worldwide. Our project will draw on the empirical support provided by access to the Oslo Medical Corpus, further developing the novel, technology-supported methodology for the empirical study of key concepts developed by SHE (UiO) in collaboration with the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network (GoK). Questions to be addressed using the Oslo Medical Corpus include, for example, what makes certain challenges ‘global’, and how are individual actors represented in relation to such global challenges. In order to ensure the applicability of our research beyond academia, we will invite non-academic stakeholders who work with health and environmental issues and who combine sustainable development goals with an equitable perspective. We aim to empower health professionals, grassroots health activists and civil society organizations to draw on the empirical analysis of language so as to effectively question how health discourses advance or undermine the sustainability agenda.
Our Team
University of Oslo
PI (main applicant) Dr Gabriela Saldanha, Affiliate Researcher, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education.
CoI – Prof Eivind Engebretsen, Professor of Medical Humanities, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education.
CoI – Prof Mona Baker, Affiiate Professor, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education.
University of Belgrade
PI - Dr Ljiljana Pantović, Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory.
CoI – Dr Irena Fiket, Associate Professor, The Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory.
Kings College London
PI - Dr Caitjan Gainty, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology
CoI - Professor Btihaj Ajana, Professor of Ethics and Digital Culture
Tags: Circle U., Oslo Medical Corpus, individual responsibility, Global health, sustainable health care