The Fall 2026 Humanitarian Water Engineering course will run from September 9 to December 9, 2026 (inclusive).

This course is a joint initiative of the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, the Lassonde School of Engineering, and CIFAL 91��ɫ. Fees are set on a sliding scale—from $600 to $2,600 CAD (+tax)—to support participation and to promote a globally diverse learning environment.

Applications are due by Monday, September 7, 2026.

To learn more information, please visit the course website here:

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Keynote speaker Dr. Andrew Pinto invited participants to move beyond describing inequitable health outcomes and toward a more explicit analysis of the forces that produce them. Drawing on his work at the , Dr. Pinto situated health within the unequal distribution of money, power, and resources, reminding the audience that global health issues such as child mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, and pandemic outcomes are patterned by social and political conditions rather than biology alone ¹. He challenged global health researchers to ask not only what causes illness, but who benefits from existing arrangements, whose lives are valued, and whether research contributes to redistributing power or reinforcing inequity.

Dr. Pinto’s keynote emphasized global health as a contested field, shaped by colonial histories, institutional power, donor priorities, and unequal access to resources. He argued that ethics in global health requires more than good intentions; it demands humility, introspection, solidarity, and social justice ². Through examples ranging from pandemic inequities and vaccine access to precarious work, migrant health, and community-based research, Dr. Pinto demonstrated how social determinants of health must be understood as political determinants of health. His central message was clear: research alone rarely produces change unless it is connected to collective action, community priorities, and broader movements for social justice.

The 2025 Seed Grant recipient presentations, which came next in the line up for the day, extended this call to make systems of power more visible. Dr. Fawzia Gibson-Fall’s work examined the role of security actors in global health, raising questions about militarization, civilian capacity building, and the everyday presence of military logics in health protection. Her project convened a wide range of actors in London, Toronto, and soon Senegal, including those working in humanitarian delivery, epidemiology, peacekeeping, water, and international human rights law, to build a community of concern around civil-military relations in global health.

Dr. Rachel Silver shared updates on her research examining the impacts of global aid austerity, particularly following the dismantling of USAID and reductions in international development funding more broadly. Building on conversations and early research supported through the CPGH Seed Grant, Dr. Silver reflected on how the project has since expanded into a larger longitudinal initiative supported through Spencer Foundation funding, examining how communities and institutions are navigating uncertainty, donor dependency, and shifting global funding landscapes.

The symposium also featured several short presentations from current DI members preparing applications for the next round of Seed Grants including projects that spanned the core themes of the DI mission.  Across the workshop, presenters showed that critical global health research is not only about identifying health challenges but about tracing the systems that make those challenges possible. Whether examining social determinants, aid austerity, militarization, digital biodiversity governance, language inequities in rehabilitation, or air pollution exposure, the presentations collectively asked how hidden structures become visible and how visibility might lead to accountability.

This year’s workshop demonstrated the continued importance of critical social science approaches in global health. It affirmed that global health is never neutral, but instead shaped by history, politics, institutions, technologies, and power struggles. Most importantly, the workshop challenged researchers to move from description to action, and to consider how their work can support more just, accountable, and collectively imagined health futures.

1.         Sharma M, Pinto AD, Kumagai AK. Teaching the Social Determinants of Health: A Path to Equity or a Road to Nowhere? Acad Med. 2018;93(1):25-30.

2.         Pinto AD, Upshur RE g. Global Health Ethics for Students. Dev World Bioeth. 2009;9(1):1-10.

Watch the full symposium here:

The post Recap — Connecting Our Work to Movements for Social Justice: Critical Perspectives in Global Health Symposium appeared first on Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research.

The 2025 seed grant recipients will also present their latest research updates in various fields of global health research in a brief 10-minute presentation.

This is an open call to 91��ɫ researchers to consider presenting at this year's in-person workshop.

91��ɫ faculty and researchers (with the support of a 91��ɫ faculty member) are invited to deliver a brief five-minute, two-slide presentation on any current or planned research project that takes a critical social science approach to global health at the workshop. Presenters will receive valuable feedback from experts in the field in preparation for the Critical Perspectives in Global Health Seed Grant Applications (valued up to $8,000 CAD each). The seed grants support critical global health research that contributes to the three themes of the Dahdaleh Institute (planetary health, global health and humanitarianism, and global health foresighting).

The registration deadline to present a new research idea is Thursday, April 16, 2026.

The post Call for Presentations – 2026 Critical Social Science Perspectives in Global Health Workshop appeared first on Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research.

that celebrates engagement and collaboration in action — showcasing how people across disciplines and continents are protecting our present and securing our future through community engagement, creativity, and storytelling:

• Nov 19 -
• Nov 20 -

From Policy to People … and Back Again

Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2025
Time: 9:00 ET/ 14:00 GMT/ 17:00 EAT (1 hour)
Location: virtual/ zoom webinar

Lasting change starts when policy and people meet. This session explores how high-level AMR strategies can be brought to life within communities — and how insights from those communities can, in turn, shape smarter, more responsive policy. Featuring solutions from PATAM, ReAct Africa, ReAct Europe and DRASA Health Trust this discussion will highlight practical, inclusive approaches that make AMR action more grounded, relevant, and sustainable. Together, we’ll explore how bridging the gap between decision-makers and everyday experiences creates stronger, more resilient systems.  

Resistance Reimagined: Where Storytelling Meets Science

Date: Thursday, November 20, 2025
Time: 8:30 ET/ 14:30 GMT/ 17:30 EAT (90 minutes)
Location: virtual/ zoom webinar

Awareness alone isn’t enough. We need connection. This session showcases how artists, designers, and storytellers are inspiring action through creative approaches that bring AMR to life. Through the  at the Global Strategy Lab and Immersive Storytelling Lab, comics, games, and immersive storytelling are transforming complex science into shared understanding and collective motivation. These creative voices remind us that art can move hearts as powerfully as data moves minds, helping people everywhere see that their choices and actions matter. 

The post Get Ready for 2025 World Antimicrobial Awareness Week! appeared first on Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research.

The Fall 2025 Humanitarian Water Engineering course will run from September 3 to 3 December 3, 2025 (inclusive).

This course is a joint initiative of the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, the Lassonde School of Engineering, and CIFAL 91��ɫ. Fees are set on a sliding scale—from $600 to $2,600 CAD (+tax)—to support participation and to promote a globally diverse learning environment.

Applications are due by Sunday, August 31, 2025.

To learn more information, please visit the course website here: 

The post Applications Open! Humanitarian Water Engineering Online Intensive Course, Fall 2025 appeared first on Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research.

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In these courses, you will learn about some of the ways climate change is impacting lakes worldwide, Indigenous relationships with water where water is related to as a living entity rather than a resource, and how to acquire and analyze global freshwater and climate databases from international experts. The material will be presented in an interactive manner, allowing learners to engage with the content in various ways.

Upon successful completion of the courses, you will receive a badge from 91��ɫ and in due course, a Certificate of Participation from the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).

To register, simply create an account through the 91��ɫ Microlecture Series in Sustainable Living platform or sign in through your Google, Microsoft, or 91��ɫU accounts.

If you have any questions about the courses, registration, or enrollment process, please do not hesitate to reach us at ugwacord@yorku.ca.

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What does it actually mean to be healthy? This is one of the questions that this year’s Critical Perspectives in Global Health Workshop sought to address and, more importantly, challenge. Anthropologist Kristina Baines raised this question in her keynote on the importance of Maya and Garifuna approaches to health and the limitations of biomedical understandings of health, with their narrow focus on physiological change (see ; ; ). The World Health Organization proposes a more expansive conceptualization that frames health as physical, mental, and social wellbeing. However, Baines cautioned against celebrating this layering of different forms of health. Instead, she proposed the grounded theory Embodied Ecological Heritage: with embodied sensory experience the distinctions between these categories of health melt away to become singular and expansive. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Garifuna and Maya communities in Belize, and Garifuna communities in New 91��ɫ City, Baines invited the audience into botanical and food worlds: scenes of making traditional hadot (Garifuna) and caldo (Maya) soups, the sensation of steam rising to the cooks’ faces, the scents, the stirring, the scouring of forests and New 91��ɫ City Chinese and Korean grocery stores for the right herbs. Ethnographic research ensures that these practices are encountered in context, revealing them to not just be physical but to also pull together socialities, moral values, and Indigenous cosmologies.  

Embodied Ecological Heritage emerges from Baines’s feminist and decolonial ethnographic approach. This kind of ethnographic research foregrounds the work of interlocutors as theorizations of health in their own right. These theorizations both challenge the onto-epistemological frameworks of biomedicine and strategically mobilize them: Baines recounted a Maya clinic that opened beside a biomedical hospital in southern Belize solicited pharmaceutical researchers to evaluate their herbs. Baines noted that while the researchers affirmed what Maya healers already new about the effectiveness of the herbs, the researchers did so through positivist modes of isolating material properties: The Maya healers, however, understood that the scent of incense and the sounds of chanting were just as therapeutic, thereby, strategically soliciting and subverting biomedical knowledge-making, often entangled in colonial technologies of domination () to support Indigenous forms of healing.

Research updates from 2024 Seed Grant recipients similarly imagined health otherwise. Andrew Dawson’s examination of trust and compliance with public health directives across multiple countries, showed that existing literature underestimates the importance of political trust. Christo El Morr also brought policy into the picture with research that uses large language models to monitor how disability issues are debated and understood on social media, producing a dashboard for potential use by advocates to transform disability policy. Raju Das’s work in Canada and India showed that the traditional global health metric “population” fails to account for the physical and social injuries of labour in a warming world.

The 2025 Seed Grant pitches affirmed the multiplicities of “health” in Global Health practice. Rachel Silver will examine how mid-level actors in NGOs, policymaking, and education in Malawi are theorizing alternative systems for development work in the wake of the recent USAID cuts. Fawzia Gibson-Fall illuminates the role of everyday securitization of global health in Senegal, contrasting with the literature’s overreliance on the idea of states of emergency. Nilanjana Ganguli inquires into the broader health impacts of the practice of sex-for-fish in Malawi, focusing on women’s stories, gendered labour, and climate change. Jesse Sam proposed arts-based research with racialized caregivers of children with autism to better understand their experiences and communicate those experiences to policymakers.

Imagining health otherwise unsettles and revises taken-for-granted of health from biomedicine and global health. Social scientists’ interventions into imaginations of health emphasize that health is dynamic, political, embodied. It is as much a matter of established medical test results and social determinants as it is about identity, kinship, and belonging in more-than-human worlds.

This year’s CPGH workshop demonstrated the astounding work 91��ɫ researchers are conducting and the critical problem-solving approach they are taking. The CPGH Program continues to support these endeavours with the CPGH Seed Grant Program which awarded four selected applicants seed grants (worth up to $7,000 CAD each).

The post Recap — Sensory Investigations in Global Health Practice: Critical Perspectives in Global Health Workshop appeared first on Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research.

The 2024 seed grant recipients will present their latest research updates in various fields of global health research in a brief 10-minute presentation. Presenters include:

• Christo El Morr – An AI-Driven Tool for Disability Rights Monitoring
• Raju J. Das – Scorching Sites: Examining the Health Impacts of Climate Change on Construction Workers
• Andrew C. Dawson – Trust and Compliance: A Cross-National Investigation of the Relationship between Political Trust and Adherence to Public Health Measures

This is an open call to 91��ɫ researchers to consider presenting at this year's in-person workshop.

91��ɫ faculty and researchers (with the support of a 91��ɫ faculty member) are invited to deliver a brief five-minute, two-slide presentation on any current or planned research project that takes a critical social science approach to global health at the workshop. Presenters will receive valuable feedback from experts in the field in preparation for the Critical Perspectives in Global Health Seed Grant Applications (valued up to $7,000 CAD each). The seed grants support critical global health research that contributes to the three themes of the Dahdaleh Institute (planetary health, global health and humanitarianism, and global health foresighting).

The registration deadline to present a new research idea is Thursday, April 10, 2025.

The post Call for Presentations – 2025 Critical Social Science Perspectives in Global Health Workshop appeared first on Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research.

From exploring lessons from the Montreal Protocol to design better strategies to manage AMR to using storytelling and art to raise awareness and discussing ways to improve access to antimicrobials during global crises, this series offers unique conversations and perspectives on tackling AMR.

The post 2024 World Antimicrobial Awareness Week appeared first on Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research.

The R+R team discussed their unique approach to climate education and shared lessons for theory and practice. The session emphasized joy, laughter, play, rest, and kindness as vital components of sustainable climate action and educational programming. This holistic approach was reinforced through practical activities like communal meals and personal check-ins, which strengthened the sense of community and support among participants. 

Several creative projects were showcased, emphasizing personal and community well-being. The first project involved creating a guide for community rituals, which included multimedia resources such as playlists and instructional videos. This initiative aimed to foster deeper relationships with the land and the materials used daily. The next project included participants developing inner child affirmation cards, which were hand-printed and designed to reconnect individuals with their inner child, facilitating emotional healing and self-care.  

Another group focused on the concept of "third places” which are community spaces where people could gather and organize for causes like climate justice and gender justice. This project underscored the importance of such spaces in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and proposed ways to enhance existing ones. Additionally, the "Queer Joy Work" project aimed to shift narratives from scarcity to abundance, creating a digital ritual space for reflection and community engagement. This group also influenced the rebranding of student projects to "Student Joy Works" to emphasize joy and creativity in their initiatives. 

The following project delved into the topic of urban agriculture, specifically microgreen cultivation, and included workshops and social media campaigns to spread knowledge and skills. The last project focused on water relations, organizing a cleanup event along the Humber River, combined with educational sessions on water teachings. 

In the concluding discussions, students that participated in the course reflected on their experience, sharing personal stories of growth, learning, and the deep sense of gratitude they felt towards the community and the teachings received. It highlighted the success of the program in not only addressing environmental issues but also in fostering a resilient, joyful, and connected community. The program provided a platform for the youth to explore innovative solutions, deepen their connections to the land and each other, and emerge empowered to continue their vital work in their respective communities.

Watch the seminar presentation below: 

The Rooted and Rising Lab recently published their .  

To learn more about the Rooted and Rising Lab,  

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