Corpus-based Datathons to Support Collaborative, Student-driven Debates on the Key European Values of Sustainability and Democracy

Erasmus+ 2023 Concepts such as sustainability and democracy combine general agreement on the abstract notion that they represent with endless disagreement about what they mean in practice. And yet, there is little reflection in current educational programmes about the reasons and implications of such disagreement. Sustainability and similar concepts are regarded as one size fits all, allowing the implementation process to be […]

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Teaching sustainable health care through the critical medical humanities

The Lancet, Comment, 2023 Authored by: Eivind Engebretsen, Ritika Sharma, Tony J Sandset, Kristin Heggen, Ole Petter Ottersen, Helen Clark, Trisha Greenhalgh   This article argues for a more critical, transformative and philosophically-underpinned approach to teaching Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The standard approach presents the SDGs as uncontested and universally agreed-upon targets, which oversimplifies their complexity and inherent contradictions and […]

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The Politics of Sustainability in Global Health

Data-driven Critical Conceptual Analysis   – What does sustainability mean in the context of public health? – Do concepts such as sustainability, empowerment, partnership and equality reflect an urge for global solidarity or rather a requirement for self-management and improvement?   In the Circle U. course Politics of Sustainability in Public Health – data-driven critical conceptual analysis, we invite students […]

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The Medicalisation of Democratic Rights in the Debate about Abortion (MEDRA): The US, Ireland and Argentina

    This project, funded by UiO:Democracy, explores how medical knowledge is mobilized in debates about abortion through corpus-based analysis       At the heart of the controversy over abortion rights are disagreements about key democratic concepts such as rights, autonomy, privacy and freedom, making the right to abortion one of the most contested in the world. MEDRA explores […]

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Risk, Future Narratives and Sustainability

We are thrilled to share the news that our project to support students’ critical engagement with risk, responsibility and sustainability has been awarded a Circle U. Interdisciplinary Thematic Research Network (ITRN) grant. We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers based at Aarhus University, the University of Oslo, and Humboldt University of Berlin. The title of our project is “Risk, Future […]

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Global Health, Sustainable Development and Individual Responsibility

We are delighted to announce that our CircleU team of researchers from the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), University of Oslo, University of Belgrade, and Kings College London has been awarded funding for an Interdisciplinary Thematic Research Network on the topic of “Global Health, Sustainable Development and Individual Responsibility: contradictory or complementary concepts?”   The tension between individual responsibility […]

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Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics: CAS Interview

  Alumni Spotlight: Eivind Engebretsen Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science & Letters (CAS) By Julie Ellinor Frølich Dalseth, 05.05.2022   ‘The question “What are the facts?” must be supplemented with another one: “How do these facts make sense to people, and why?”’, said former CAS project leader and professor at the University of Oslo Eivind […]

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SHEtalks: Self-tracking as personal science

Bhitaj Ajana, King’s College London, UK 5 May 2022 12:00–13:00   In this talk, I revisit the Quantified Self movement, a community of practice concerned with the use and development of self-tracking tools for the purpose of self-improvement and health management (see https://quantifiedself.com/about/what-is-quantified-self/). I discuss the ways in which Quantified Self practices and their data driven approach can be considered as […]

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SHEtalks: Paradoxes and Ambivalences in Risk Communication about the Pandemic and Climate Change

What are the lessons for sustainable healthcare education? Antoinette Mary Fage-Butler, Aarhus University, Denmark 28. April 2022 12:00–13:00   With the steady flow of risk messages about the pandemic and climate change, the 2020s have reminded us viscerally of our human frailty to novel viruses and the vulnerability of our planetary home to climate change. In many ways, the institutional/mainstream […]

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Professor Eivind Engebretsen is appointed Circle U Chair of Global Health

  Eivind Engebretsen has been appointed as Chair of Global Health at the European University Alliance Circle U, with the mission to explore the interface between global health and democracy. Professor Engebretsen’s chair covers two thematic areas, global health and democracy, and explores the interface between them. More specifically, he aims to interrogate the global ambition that underpins the sustainable development […]

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