TRANS-WELL - From Health System Transformation to Well-Being Ecosystems: Integrating Volatile Mobility Settings into Inclusive Development Pathways
An international multi-disciplinary research project
In multilayered crises settings, thousands of people are often facing displacement, and public health facilities are grossly overburdened in their task to provide medical support. In these settings, mobility has transcended from an exceptional circumstance to become the prevailing norm in securing livelihoods under stress, contrasting with the traditional notion of place-bound strategies.
TRANS-WELL is investigating the interplay between (im)mobility and health in crisis regions where economic challenges, armed conflict and violence, and critical environmental change are driving people to migrate. These mobility flows challenge conventional policy approaches and humanitarian action.
The project addresses three core issues: (1) What are the conditions and processes that promote or hinder the development of innovative solutions for a more inclusive reconfiguration of current humanitarian action and public health services? (2) How can these solutions contribute to Health Sovereignty and a more sustainable, prospective health system planning? (3) (How) Can a "Well-being ecosystem" approach advance theoretical and methodological framings and meaningfully inform knowledge, empathetic policy design and action in the (im)mobilities-health nexus? Case studies from Mozambique, the Dominican Republic and Thailand generate data and insights to help reconfiguring public health systems such that they prioritise social justice and sustainable development.
Key facts about TRANS-WELL
Many disciplines, one goal
Geographers, epidemiologists, public health experts and political and social scientists form the project consortium - all jointly striving for one goal: a better understanding of how an integrative and just well-being ecosystem can meaningfully contribute to more inclusive health care services for mobile and immobile citizens, migrants and local residents alike. Even under conditions of severe stress and conflict.
Three cases, one challenge
TRANS-WELL works in three regions marked by severe ruptures and massive involuntary displacement: Northern Mozambique, the Dominican Republic, and Northern Thailand. These settings pose huge challenges for our on-site field research, but the biggest is of a global scale: How to reconfigure public health services such that they prioritise social justice, empathy and sustainable development over cost efficiency, mere biomedicalisation, and the maintenance of given political dependencies and hegemony? While we work in the so-called "South", creative solutions may work across the globe.
Research WITH people
The project consortium is basically a group of academic experts. But TRANS-WELL collaborates with practitioners, humanitarian agencies, NGOs and, most importantly, local residents (often considered as experts of their own lifeworlds). The project adopts a co-production and co-benefits approach for its work. It is also firmly rooted in a triangular South-South-North cooperation.
This is what others say about us
VolkswagenStiftung
TRANS-WELL is funded by VolkswagenStiftung in collaboration with Novo Nordisk Fonden and Wellcome Trust. Find out more about TRANS-WELL and four other projects supported under their funding scheme "Transdisciplinary Approaches to Mobility and Global Health". (in German)
VolkswagenStiftung
Check out our donors' call for multi-perspective research into the interactions between mobility and health. (in English)
The state capital of Hannover
Learn about the five projects funded under our donors' call "Transdisciplinary Approaches to Mobility and Global Health". (in English)
FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
Read the press release and an easy to understand project description by our host institution, the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). (in German)
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Contact
Trans-Well Research
Institute of Geography
FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
Wetterkreuz 15
91058 Erlangen, Germany
fred.krueger[at]fau.de