DOROTHY (DevelOp interdisciplinaRy apprOaches to healTH crisis collaborativelY) COFUND is a postdoctoral research programme that is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), Research Ireland, Health Research Board (HRB), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The three Irish funding agencies, Research Ireland, the HRB and EPA, came together to create this interdisciplinary fellowship programme on the topic of public health crises and their legacies.
The public health approach is to promote better health and wellbeing in society as a whole, preventing illness through working across sectors. Challenges to public health include, but are not limited to, economic crises, inequalities, ageing populations, increasing levels of infectious and noncommunicable diseases and mental health problems, migration and urbanisation, and environmental damage and climate change. To this end, research is key to finding solutions to public health crises.
The COVID-19 pandemic naturally focused the attention of governments and state agencies on research addressing the medical and technical aspects of the pandemic. Aiming to complement these efforts with a more holistic and long-term strategy, the MSCA DOROTHY COFUND is launching the careers of future experts able to tackle public health crises not only as medical problems but also as multi-faceted societal challenges, which require solid understanding of how best to effect behavioural, social and system-level change in response to public health crises.
If we really want to promote health and wellbeing across society, we need not only top- class researchers from STEM disciplines, but also from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) disciplines, whose focus is on people, their values, their behaviours and on how social change can be effected.
Now in 2024 there is a cohort of DOROTHY fellows, who, through the innovative DOROTHY multidisciplinary research and training platform, are developing as a critical mass of networked experts able to exert positive societal impact though their research. Of these 7 are from AHSS research disciplines, ranging from literary studies to psychology to anthropology.
- Niamh Dooley is investigating youth mental health. The mental health of teenagers and young people has reached crisis point in Ireland. The limited evidence available points to high rates of teenage self-harm and suicide attempts, and a healthcare service that struggles to meet the increasing demands. However, we do not have recent population-wide data on mental health of young people in Ireland. To address this gap in knowledge, this project will use recently collected survey data to find out how common mental health problems are among young people and how things have changed since 2018, and to collect further data to address the questions of what contributes to mental health problems in young people today. The goal is to reach policymakers and government to effect sustained change.
- Aoife Marie Foran is examining the importance of group identity in promoting positive health behaviours. Globally, the management of COVID-19 has been undermined by vaccine hesitancy, vaccine effectiveness and limited understanding of the course of the disease and in particular, long COVID. It is clear that there are important social determinants influencing all of these factors, and that social groups and their related social identities are fundamental to health. This research focuses on identifying social solutions to protect people’s health, and will inform evidence-based policies to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 and similar infectious disease outbreaks in the future.
- Rebecca Close is taking a cultural studies perspective on imaging reproductive crisis (declining fertility), examining the role of time-lapse technologies in imaging the reproductive cell in lab settings and shaping popular understandings of fertility and reproduction more broadly. The project addresses the racial, gender and sexual politics of imaging/imagining fertility and reproduction to be ‘in crisis’ in Europe through lab ethnography and animation film creation. Rebecca will be working to build an integrated understanding of the connections between scientific knowledge and practice, and between knowledge and power.
- Sophie Franklin is a literary scholar, whose work examines historical narratives of social violence in order to shed light on ongoing public health approaches to the reduction and cure of violence. The project engages with current public discourses surrounding treating violence as a public health crisis through the analysis of Violence Reduction Units, government-funded initiatives in the UK that adopt public health methods to tackle violence within communities and across society. In the process, the project explores how nineteenth-century imaginings of violence as contagious anticipate and potentially inform ongoing public health approaches to violence today, through identifying both effective and detrimental implications of such interventions.
- Purity Mwendwa is developing a new model for supporting dementia suffers in rural Kenya. This project asks how can rural neighbourhoods better support people with dementia and caregivers in rural Kenya where people with dementia may be regarded with considerable suspicion and left isolated from their communities. This work approaches rural neighbourhoods as networks of locally situated people characterised by communality and a sense of belonging to place that are shaped by cultural beliefs, values, norms, and traditions. This approach and the bespoke model can potentially be transferable or adaptable to other contexts and issues beyond dementia and potentially beyond health.
- Amanda Lubit is conducting a comparative study of cross-border care strategies that women refugees and asylum seekers employ for survival during converging public health crises in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Crises do not occur in isolation, but often overlap with other emergencies, and the most vulnerable tend to experience multiple societal shocks at the same time. This research is investigating complex crisis situations so that future policies have the best chance of preparing societies for effective and comprehensive responses.
- Judith Bek is developing digital training with motor-cognitive strategies to improve movement in Parkinson’s disease, from a psychology perspective. Parkinson’s disease impacts significantly on healthcare systems and individuals’ quality of life. Although medications can help to control symptoms, new non-medical therapeutic approaches are also needed to improve outcomes for people with Parkinson’s. This research involves working with health professionals, dance instructors and people with Parkinson’s to design a training app for watching, imagining, and practicing dance movements at home. The knowledge from this research could be used to develop widely-available and motivating home-based therapies and strategies to improve symptoms and quality of life for people with Parkinson’s.
As we can see from their diverse approaches and projects, these DOROTHY AHSS fellows are not only taking an AHSS lens to traditional public health topics, they are re-defining our understandings of what constitutes a public health crises, producing research that can change our health, our lives and our societies for the better.
For more information about the DOROTHY COFUND visit: www.dorothy.ie