Human Rights and Public Health

Human rights play a key role in public health. Our research is driven by using human rights as a lens to explore how the language, ideas, and principles of human rights can inform the transformation towards a more just and more sustainable world.

We seek to develop a more in-depth understanding of inequalities, marginalization, and stigma. This entails a focus on lived experiences as well as studying the processes and drivers of exclusion. The lens of human rights further informs our study of responses to marginalization and discrimination. We are interested in processes of mobilization, collective action, and social movement building as well as their interaction with policy-making and institutional protection of human rights.

At present, menstrual health as a topical and growing field at the intersection of gender and rights is a key area of our research. Menstruation matters because it unites the personal and the political, the intimate and the public, the physiological and the socio-cultural. It is about so much more than blood. We also have a long-standing interest in water and sanitation as underlying determinants of health with a focus on understanding inequalities and disparities in access.

Our work is transdisciplinary, collaborative, and impact-driven. We rely on a repertoire of methods drawing from the social sciences, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, qualitative surveys, and document and media analysis. Our research is socially embedded and engaged in collaboration with patient advocacy groups, social movements and civil society groups.