Announcing the Winners of the 2025 Seed Grants in Critical Social Science Perspectives in Global Health Research

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Published on July 8, 2025

Following the sixth annual Critical Perspective for Global Health Research (CPGH) workshop in April, the CPGH Steering Committee is delighted to announce that the following York researchers have been awarded this year’s $7,000 seed grants to initiate novel and innovative ideas that take a critical social science approach to global health research:

Rachel Silver

Reconfigurations and Refusals: Forging Futures Beyond Aid in Malawi

In March 2025, President Trump shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), cutting more than $40 billions of dollars of promised funding. In Malawi, the U.S. alone contributed over 13% of the country’s overall 2024/2025 budget. While aid can meaningfully impact lives, the global aid architecture—the organizations, funding mechanisms, policies, and programs that scaffold development activities worldwide—is deeply flawed, often reproducing power hierarchies rooted in colonial histories and relationships. This pilot study conducted by a transnational research team (1) considers if and how aid cuts might catalyze decolonization of Malawi’s education and health sectors and (2) begins to reimagine possibilities for humanitarian engagement. Our project centers how local development workers theorize alternative arrangements for education within highly inequitable systems. Situated between international funders and community-based recipients, Malawian policymakers, NGO staff-members, and fieldworkers are uniquely positioned to reconceptualize aid mechanisms and forge new resourcing futures. 

Fawzia Gibson-Fall

Researching the Role of Security Actors in Global Health

This project examines the expanding role of security actors in global health at a time of intensifying global crises and shrinking aid budgets. Using qualitative methods such as interviews, archival and media analysis, the study explores the historical, everyday, and geopolitical dimensions of this engagement. It offers timely insights into the health-security nexus and informs future global health governance. The programme of work includes a field visit to Senegal and four in-person workshops: a policy workshop at the Pasteur Institute in Dakar, three research expansion meetings in Canada and the United Kingdom, linking colleagues at King’s College London and York University. These activities are designed to co-develop policy tools, build networks, and advance this research agenda. Key outputs include visual material for an upcoming scholarly book, Health Warriors: The Global Politics of Military Health in Africa (Johns Hopkins University Press), peer-reviewed articles, and the development of international grant proposals.

The purpose of the CPGH Seed Grants is to support York University–based critical social science perspectives in global health research that contribute to the research themes of the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research: planetary health; global health and humanitarianism; and global health foresighting. The Seed Grants are also meant to encourage faculty to develop fuller grant proposals for Fall Tri-Council and other grant deadlines. Recipients will present the progress of their research at next year’s Critical Social Science Perspectives in Global Health Research Workshop. 

The Dahdaleh Institute and the CPGH Steering Committee would like to thank all the applicants this year and congratulate the 2025 CPGH Seed Grant recipients. 

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