CEHI Summer Institute > Competitions
CEHI Summer Institute
The first FORHEAD Summer Institute was held in Kunming, August 23-8, 2009. The forty-five participants included both experienced researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds and young researchers and NGO staff seeking to learn about the field.
Disciplinary approaches. The first part of the meeting took the form of concentrated introductory lectures on the contribution that various disciplinary perspectives can make to our understanding of environment-related health risks. These included the following topics:
- The spatial and demographic distribution of rural environment-related health risks in China (Medical Geography)
- Assessing environmental health risks (Epidemiology)
- Understanding risk perception (Social Psychology)
- Assessing the economic cost of environmental impacts on health (Economics)
- Understanding policy and issue networks (Political Science)
- Legal approaches to addressing environmental health risks (Law)
- Community understandings of and responses to risk (Anthropology)
- The nature and challenges of interdisciplinary research (SSRC)
Topical panels. The second part of the meeting involved discussion of these perspectives and of the challenges of cross-disciplinary research in the context of several specific topic areas: rural mining and industry; non-point pollution; intensive animal husbandry; providing clean drinking water to rural areas; food production and health; and rural housing and health. Each session included a presentation by the recipients of the SSRC collaborative grants program, and presentations by at least one other project on the same topic.
Participation. In order to ensure active participation and learning throughout the Institute, on the first day participants formed small groups with members of different disciplines. Throughout the course of the week, these groups met periodically to share their ideas and to develop the framework for a cross-disciplinary research project of their own. On the last day, the teams presented these research designs to the group and received feedback and ranking from the team of experts.
List of recipients for this competition is not yet available.