Public Health and Rural Development

This seminar attempts to map the intersection between research on Public Health and research on Rural Development. It features three short presentations from prominent scholars in the field of Public Health from Sweden and Norway, whose research combines insights from medicine and anthropology, qualitative and quantitative methods and spans contexts from the Nordic countries to the global South.
The discussion will focus on what Public Health and Rural Development research has in common, and how the two fields could relate to each other more purposively.

Disability and Rural Development in Tanzania: Universal health coverage for all Graziella van den Bergh Associate Professor at the Department of Health and Functioning, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, and Center for International Health, University of Bergen. With a background in both anthropology and physiotherapy, her research interests are global health, rehabilitation, disability and reproductive health. Her research spans from Norwegian contexts to Tanzania and Sudan.
Health, Culture and Welfare Systems Frode Fadnes Jacobsen Professor and Head of Research at the Center for Care Research, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, and Professor at Betanien University. With a background in nursing, anthropology, medicine and biology, Jacobsen’s research focuses on health, culture and welfare systems, including different aspects of organization of health services.
Somali-Swedish Research Cooperation for Health (and Development) Maria Emmelin Professor of Global Health, Division of Social Medicine and Global Health, Lund University. Her research focuses on public health evaluation and the social determinants of health in Sweden and globally. She has studied the social aspects of cardiovascular disease prevention in Sweden, the role of social capital of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Tanzania, reproductive health in Ethiopia and South Africa and gender based violence in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Indonesia. She has a special interest in methodology development, focusing on the integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches.