Event Details

Drawing from research on Covid-19 pandemic and other systemic crises in Brazil, Gabriela will confront the dominant technocratic rationalities and framings of risk, emergency and sustainability, shedding light on potentialities of socio-constructivist approach for critical studies in global health.

From a global health perspective, the Covid-19 pandemic’s multiple negative impacts reinforce the urgency to implement and evaluate measures that reduce vulnerabilities, and amplify the consistency and permanence of emergency response actions. However, given the fact that the pandemic has continued to collide with other social and environmental disruptions, interacting with other interconnected systemic crises, the pandemic sheds light on the need for renewed efforts of critique in global health. In other words, there is a need of a global health approach that enables us to better understand how this and other systemic crises are the result of complex interactions between environment and social actions, and how their synergistic and cumulative effects demand deep changes in the pattern of civilization and urgent transformations for a more adapted future.

In her talk, Dr Gabriela Marques Di Giulio argues that these critique efforts imply a radical break with the dominant rationalities underpinning three notions that are intrinsically interconnected, particularly in the current crises: risk, emergency and sustainability. Drawing insights from our studies of the pandemic (and other crises) in Brazil she seeks to confront the dominant conceptualizations and framings of these three notions in focus, shedding light on some potentialities of socio-constructivist approach for critical studies in global health.

Gabriela is Associate Professor at Environmental Health Department, University of São Paulo (Brazil) and Visiting Researcher at Politics Department, University of York (UK). Her current research programme focuses on the human dimension of climate change; crises, risks and uncertainties; science-policy-communication interactions; global health and sustainability. This seminar session will be chaired by Lancaster Environment Centre's Dr Luke Parry.

Read about Gabriela's work:

• Global Health and Planetary Health: Perspectives for a transition to a more sustainable world post COVID-19
• Challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic: for a Brazilian research agenda in global health and sustainability
• Lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic: sustainability is an indispensable condition of Global Health Security

Joining the seminar

This session will be held in-person only in the Biology Lecture Theatre (directions on Mazemap).

The live seminar will be recorded and the video uploaded to Lancaster Environment Centre's YouTube channel in due course.

Please contact Luke Parry if you would like to arrange to meet with the speaker.

Full LEC Seminar series

Follow the full programme at https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lec/about-us/events/