Encouraging cross-departmental teaching and inter-divisional research at the intersection of environmental change, international development, and public health

TEACHING

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The Option Course, which can be taken by Masters students registered for the MPhil in Development Studies; MSc in Public Health; MSc in Environmental Change and Management; MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management; MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management; and MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy, takes place every Tuesday in Hilary Term (5-7pm, QEH, SR2).

Lecturers

Proochista Ariana

Proochista Ariana is Lecturer in Global Health and Development in the Department of Public Health and the Department of International Development (ODID). Her research empirically explores the relationship between development processes and health, as variously defined. She has recently completed research on the impact of development on indigenous communities in Southern Mexico and is currently involved with a project examining health transitions in rural China. She is also the Secretary for the Human Development Capability Association (HDCA) and involved with the Young Lives project at ODID. She holds a Doctorate in International Development from Oxford and a Masters in International Health from Harvard.

David Bradley

David Bradley is Ross Professor of Tropical Hygiene Emeritus at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is a physician, communicable disease epidemiologist and zoologist. After studies at Cambridge and London he lived and worked in East Africa - Tanzania and Uganda - for ten years and has continued to carry out research there, also in India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and the UK as well as making shorter working visits to many other countries. After initial work on community pathogenesis, epidemiology and the public health importance of schistosomiasis he worked on domestic water supply and health in East Africa, on Mycobacterium ulcerans, and the theoretical basis of tropical public health. He devised the now generally adopted functional classification of water-related diseases. Since his 'retirement' he has worked with Ugandan colleagues on the disease problems of settling nomadic pastoralists and the resulting environmental, water and health changes and he has returned to his fascination with the role of water bodies in disease and with landscape epidemiology, as well as working on the historical epidemiology of India, on revising the classification of water-related diseases, on the conceptualization of transdisciplinary public health issues and on imported malaria.

Melanie Frost

Melanie Frost is currently a quantitative researcher on the Young Lives project at the Oxford Department of International Development. This role involves collecting and analysing survey data on education, mainly from Ethiopia and Andhra Pradesh. Her main research interests are childbearing decisions in high-risk settings, intergenerational transmissions, fertility as an informal insurance mechanism and son preference in South Asia. Melanie is a trained demographer and statistician and has extensive experience using survey data from less developed countries including Demographic and Heath Surveys, Living Standards Measurement Surveys and the recent World Health Surveys conducted in the Middle East.

Peter Wynn Kirby

Peter Wynn Kirby is a Research Fellow in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. An environmental specialist, Peter focusses on toxic waste and nuclear risk in Japan--notably in the irradiated aftermath of the 2011 tsunami disaster in Tohoku--and scrutinizes the cultural underpinnings of environmental attitudes, from popular culture to conceptions of purity and pollution. He has recently embarked on research into transnational flows of e-waste and resulting toxic fallout in East Asia and beyond. His most recent book is Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2011), and he has also published opinion pieces on a variety of topics in The New York Times, The Japan Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Before coming to Oxford, Peter worked at several universities, including tenured/permanent positions, in Japan, France, and the UK, and in addition to conducting ongoing fieldwork in these three nations, he has more recently joined a team of ethnographic researchers in China.

Anna Lora-Wainwright

Anna Lora-Wainwright joined Oxford in 2009 as University Lecturer in the Human Geography of China. She has a DPhil in Anthropology from Oxford, an MA in Chinese Studies and a BA in Anthropology, both from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She has previously worked at the University of Oxford and at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on environmental pollution, development and health in the Chinese countryside. She is a keen supporter of long-term ethnographic field research and since 2004 she has carried out a total of 18 months of fieldwork in Southwest China. Her book, forthcoming with University of Hawai'i Press is titled Fighting for Breath: Living Morally and Dying of Cancer in a Chinese Village. It explores lay perceptions of illness causality and everyday practices of care as prisms to understand how relationships with family members, locality and the state are reproduced or contested since the socio-economic reforms. Since 2006, her interests in cancer and in the mutual relationship between health, human activity and environment have led Anna to focus more closely on pollution in rural China, and she has organized and taken part in several interdisciplinary workshops on these topics. Anna's most recent work examines the impact of citizens' perceptions of environmental damage to health on patterns of response. She is interested in comparative environmental justice, grassroots environmentalisms and citizen science. Her research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Laura Rival

Laura Rival is University Lecturer in Anthropology and Development in the Department of International Development (ODID) where she has been teaching and researching the anthropology of nature, society and development since 2001. In addition, she is an active member of the School of Anthropology (SAME), the Latin American Centre (LAC) and the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests (OCTF). With her students and research collaborators, Laura has studied a wide range of conceptualizations and uses of the Amazon biome, including the mechanisms by which humans know and symbolize the biological world, reproduce and transform their social and cultural worlds, and contribute to the making of the forested landscapes they inhabit. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador with the Huaorani and the Chachi, and with the Makushi in Guyana. Laura is currently researching the intersections of development, environment and health through a new project on indigenous food systems in Latin America.

Pete Scarborough

Pete Scarborough is a senior researcher in the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group at Oxford University. His research fields include the primary prevention of chronic disease through improved nutrition, and the associations between public health and environmental sustainability. Previous work includes investigations of the impact of taxes and subsidies on diet and nutrition; the impact of front-of-pack food labeling; development of a nutrient profile model to regulate broadcast advertising of foods during children's television in the UK; and estimating the health impact of achieving diets with low greenhouse gas emissions. Much of Dr Scarborough's work involves modeling, and he is the lead researcher on a project developing an integrated model of the impact on chronic disease of simultaneous population-level changes in diet, physical activity, smoking and alcohol consumption.

 

Questions? Get in touch

Questions? Get in touch...

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