“The aim of our project is to raise awareness among students about the existence of various perspectives within global health and that these perspectives can differ significantly,” says teaching assistant Aleksa Jovanović, Institute of Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade. He leads the seed funded project VersaHealth.
The University of Vienna and King’s College London are the two partners in the project, but the project originates from Paris. Or more precisely, from the summer school “Rethinking Global Health”, held in Paris in July 2023.
Maturing an idea
“When we met at the summer school in Paris, we discussed the different implications of the complex challenges that comprise global health. In October we participated in a public lecture on “Politics in Global Health” in Belgrade, where four doctoral students from the University of Belgrade who had participated in the Paris summer school, offered a critical analysis of the lectures presented. This moment was pivotal, as it inspired the conceptualization of a project aimed at exploring global health issues from various perspectives,” says Jovanović. This idea eventually evolved into the VersaHealth workshop.
Networks were instrumental
Jovanović says that the networks established during the Paris summer school enabled them to get in touch easily and quickly with likeminded colleagues from partner universities:
“That allowed us to expand our initial team of four by including two new members – from King’s College London and the University of Vienna. Our multicultural, multidisciplinary team has the vision of spreading awareness about the complexity of global health issues, and the existence of various perspectives to the students of partner universities and beyond,” he says.
The idea behind organizing the workshop on-site, with colleagues from King’s College London, and the University of Vienna travelling to Belgrade, is to strengthen the bonds between the students at different universities which are part of the Circle U. Alliance, and consequently, to strengthen the Alliance itself.
Same problem, different solutions
There will be two major outputs of the project: a hybrid workshop that will be held live at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade and also live-streamed; and a scientific paper that will be drafted and then submitted to an open-access journal. The paper will analyze the knowledge, attitudes and practices of participating students regarding various aspects of global health discussed in the workshop.
“We want to emphasize that the same global health problem can have completely different implications and solutions in different geographical locations,” concludes Jovanović.
