The spirit of the Centre for Global Health Policy is – much like global health itself – one of courageously traversing conventional boundaries. The Centre is dedicated to actively bridging three such boundaries in particular:
- Boundaries between Academic Disciplines – Formulating sound global health policy requires a combination of medical and social scientific expertise, yet these disciplines have often evolved separately within academic institutions. The Centre for Global Health Policy at Sussex actively encourages researchers from the medical and social sciences to pool their collective and rich expertise about the origins, spread, prevention and treatment of disease. To that end the Centre for Global Health Policy at Sussex hosts researchers from a wide variety of more than ten academic disciplines drawn from across the medical and social sciences, encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to global health.
- Boundaries between Global Health and Other Issue Areas – The pursuit of global health does not occur in vacuum, but in a rich social environment along with a number of other pressing global challenges that both shape – and are shaped by – global health. Yet all too often these issues are studied in isolation from one another. The Centre for Global Health Policy particularly encourages research on global health that locates global health in a wider social context, including (but not restricted to) the complex interactions between global health and development, global health and education, global health and migration, global health and climate change, global health and security, and so forth.
- Boundaries Between Professional Communities – Effective global health policy requires close interaction between the scholarly and policy communities in global health. The Centre is therefore keen to encourage and promote dialogue between these professional communities so that rigorous and innovative scholarship undertaken at the university can benefit and improve global health policy. The Centre is particularly keen to promote research that draws attention to overlooked or marginalized global health issues (e.g. podoconiosis), that develops new conceptual or methodological frameworks for understanding and improving global health, that exposes weaknesses or misconceptions in current global health policy, that generates new forms of knowledge and/or data about global health, and so forth.