Center for Global Health
Putting people first
The promise of global health requires us to address some of the most complex and difficult challenges facing humans. Sustainable solutions will need to address not just the medical, but also the complexly inter-related social, cultural, political, ecological, and economic challenges we face in a globalized era. Our research, training, and outreach efforts in global health are about understanding and supporting communities as the identify and manage the health challenges they define as priorities. Located in the school that has the nation’s foremost research-intensive anthropology program alongside the nation's largest global health undergraduate training program gives us a unique means to build global health solutions that put people first.
Each year our center pushes forward one ground-breaking and important theme that we believe can reinvent and reimagine how we do global health.
Center Theme 2022-23: Familial Context & Care: Embodied Experiences of Disruption, Distance and Duty
Our 2022-23 annual theme will explore the ways that our most foundational and primary evolutionary human relationships, those between children and their extended familial care networks, both impact and are influenced by an ever-changing contemporary world. Under the lead of biological anthropologist, Robin Nelson, a global health faculty member in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, we will explore the ways that families have identified and strengthened the most helpful relationships and navigated the difficult ones to thrive in challenging social moments and environmental contexts.
- How might we conceptualize of familial interdependence that incorporates well-tested evolutionary theories about relatedness and incorporates proximate challenges facing communities around the world today?
- How does our (in)ability to understand and account for the complexity of these relationships impact our understanding of the complicated mechanisms that lead to disparities in health outcomes for caretakers and children globally? What additional information do we need to capture and how may that impact our theory building?
The center will be innovating and testing models through academic and community dialogs, workshops, project design, trainings, and publications.
Center Theme 2023-24: Sex and Gender: Transforming Global Health Practice
Almost all global health research includes consideration of gender or sex in one way or another, whether a focus of research or just a means to organize data. In collaboration with the Ernst Strüngmann Forum, our 2023-24 theme is concerned with identifying and disseminating the best current thinking about how to deploy the concepts of gender, sex, and gender/sex across all domains of research but with a particular focus on global health justice.