HEALENAE: Health and Environment in Africa and Europe is run by a consortium of six universities: in Aarhus (Denmark), Cape Town (South Africa), Edinburgh (UK), Leuven (Belgium), Nairobi (Kenya), and Oslo (Norway). Makerere University in Uganda is associated partner and will issue degrees as secondary university.
The HEALENAE Doctoral Network offers a cross-continental, innovative, interdisciplinary, and multi-sectoral anthropological approach to pressing, interrelated health and environmental challenges across contemporary Africa and Europe. HEALENAE will develop a strong interdisciplinary network that is based in anthropology, global one health, environmental and regional studies, to document and analyse connections, correspondences and new challenges for health and environmental contexts in and between Africa and Europe.
By exploring specific topic areas of health and environment through long-term anthropological fieldwork, the research will provide insights into and enable future mitigations of challenges related to current changes of demographics, disease patterns, climate and environmental harm, accelerated urbanisation, unequally distributed growth, refugee challenges, gender and generational dynamics. The Doctoral Candidates will collaborate across projects to bring together insights anchored in different sectors and countries. They will analyse these in relation to each other and create clarity of interlinkages between specific health and environmental domains in an intercontinental perspective. Together, approaches from anthropology, post-colonial and regional studies on health and environment offer unique research perspectives and methods providing grounded, bottom-up understandings of how environments and health issues play out in everyday settings.
The research network offers an academically stimulating and interdisciplinary working environment, an innovative training programme that allows the PhD fellows to obtain specialist knowledge on a specific research topic as well as transferable skills that can be employed in academic as well as non-academic institutions. The HEALENAE PhD education includes one year of fieldwork in Africa and/or Europe, annual training schools and writing retreats and a 6 months stay with the secondary university.