Critical global health research entails critical social science with global public health. This means engaging directly with global public health actors to transform global public health while remaining committed to social science theory and methodology.

On December 4, 2019, the Dahdaleh Institute hosted the inaugural York Faculty and Fellow Workshop on Critical Perspectives in Global Health. Challenging the divide between academic and applied research, the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research invites the York University community to participate in an ongoing discussion on critical perspectives in global health research (CPGH).An open call to York University researchers for presentations yielded a variety of perspectives on and avenues for this work and provided a starting point for a shared understanding of critical perspectives in global health. CPGH Workshops are now held every spring, featuring presentations by York faculty and fellows on their critical social science research in global health. Participants share and engage with members of the research community at York University from a variety of disciplines, which we hope will lead to new insights, collaboration, and research opportunities.

Seed Grants

To foster more research in this area, the Dahdaleh Institute also offers a Seed Grant Program for Critical Perspectives in Global Health, awarding five grants worth CAD $5,000 each year. York University faculty members and postdoctoral researchers from across the university are encouraged to apply.

The purpose of the grant is to enable and support critical global health research at York University that contributes to the three themes of the Dahdaleh Institute: planetary health; global health and humanitarianism; and global health foresighting. Applicants are strongly encouraged to learn more about each theme at yorku.ca/dighr.

The seed grants are also meant to encourage faculty to develop fuller grant proposals for Fall Tri-Council (and other agency or funder) grant deadlines.

Grant recipients are invited to present at the annual Dahdaleh Institute Workshop on Critical Perspectives in Global Health.

Sign up for the Dahdaleh Institute newsletter to receive notice of this seed grant and other opportunities.

Past CPGH Seed Grant Recipients

2023

• Syed Imran Ali and Stephanie Gora – Community-Based Participatory Water Quality Monitoring for Safe Water Optimization in the Canadian North
• Chloe Clifford Astbury – Mining, Health, and Environmental Change: Using Systems Mapping to Understand Relationships in a Complex System
• Godfred Boateng – Retooling Black Anxiety: An Exploratory and Intervention Study of Black Families with Children In and Out of the Criminal Justice System in Canada
• Ahmad Firas Khalid – Using Experiential Simulation-Based Learning to Increase Students' Ability to Analyze Increasingly Complex Global Health Challenges: A Mixed Methods Study
• Gerson Luiz Scheidweiler Ferreira – Breaking Barriers to Sexual and Reproductive Health: Empowering Venezuelan Refugee Women in Brazil's Resettlement Process

2022

• Pablo Aránguiz – Decolonizing planetary health through Williche ecologies of repair
• Simone Bohn – State capacity and health equity in a post-slavery context: The case of the Quilombolas in Brazil
• Maggie MacDonald – Misoprostol in humanitarian settings
• Blessing Ogbuokiri – Harnessing social media data to complement infectious disease outbreak surveillance data
• Jeffrey Squire – Covid-19 and healthcare waste management in urban Africa

2021

• Claudia Chaufan – The violence of nonviolence: A critical analysis of the academic literature on the health effects of sanctions
• Denielle Elliott – Situated neurology: An ethnographic study of neurology in Kenya
• Oghenowede Eyawo – Critical perspectives on the epidemiological dimensions of COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa: What can the world learn?
• Michaela Hynie – Consequences of human rights violations on trust among refugees in South Africa: Implications for public health
• Jessica Vorstermans – Decolonizing the social determinants of health to identify areas for mobilizing South-South partnerships of humanitarian solidarity

2020

• Christina Hoicka – Advancing a just and democratic renewable energy transition in Canada
• Sadia Malik – From territorial security to human security: The role of public health in national and global security frameworks
• Marina Morrow - Centring human rights in global mental health: Service user approaches
• Jack Rozdilsky– Working to close the gap in COVID-19 response-generated demands in a Canadian First Nations context
• Adrian Viens – The need for a critical perspective on the ethical dimensions of the global humanitarian response to COVID-19

Article - Critical Social Science with Public Health: Agonism, Critique and Engagement

Co-authored by CPGH Steering Committee member Prof. Eric Mykhalovskiy, this article is about a mode of scholarly practice termed critical social science with public health. Critical social science with public health engages directly with public health actors, while remaining committed to the specificity of social science theory and methodology. It aims to transform public health, often by seeking to lessen the harmful effects of public health practice, while, at the same time, contributing to critical social science scholarship.

Click here to download the full article.

Mykhalovskiy, Eric, et al. Critical Social Science with Public Health: Agonism, Critique and Engagement. Critical Public Health, vol. 29, no. 5, Oct. 2019, pp. 522–533, doi:10.1080/09581596.2018.1474174.

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