Citizen health: “We want to include citizens in the research”
Margareta Rämgård, director of Malmö University's new research center Citizen Health and associate professor at the Department of Care Sciences.
Malmö University's new Citizen Health research centre aims to promote good health by creating socially sustainable communities. The focus is on citizens who are involved in the whole scope of the research process to create new knowledge. “It's a form of democratisation of research where social science meets health science,” says director Margareta Rämgård.
Citizen Health is an interdisciplinary research centre with staff from all five faculties of the University. Its focus is on improving health promotion in public health and establish health equity in a broad sense. To achieve this, the centre works with community-engaged research and participatory methods in education.
Citizens should be more involved in the research; many groups in society are marginalised and are often left out, and it is always someone else who determines what their needs are.
Margareta Rämgård
The research methodology is from participatory research and is known as Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). Simply put, this means that different stakeholders, such as the public sector, community organisations, decision-makers, and researchers, create new knowledge together.
A crucial factor for Citizen Health is that citizens are seen as active individuals who, with the right support, can take responsibility for their health.
“Citizens should be more involved in the research; many groups in society are marginalised and are often left out, and it is always someone else who determines what their needs are,” says Rämgård, associate professor at the Department of Care Sciences, who together with Susanna Hedenborg, professor of sports science, and Michael Strange, associate professor of international relations, make up the steering group for the centre.
An important ambition for the research centre is to integrate young researchers and create an international environment for them. Some already associated with the centre include:
- PhD student Louise Burenby Yxne, whose participatory research project investigates children's wellbeing together with the children
- PhD student Lisa Axelsson, who is investigating the barriers migrants face in terms of health, particularly linked to the need for movement and physical activity with migrant women
- PhD student Dennis Munetsi, who is researching the global and everyday political economy of menstrual health apps with communities, focusing on both their economic flows and how the technology is received in Zimbabwe.
The PhD students are also part of global research networks.
As a newly established research centre, Citizen Health is in the early stages of its work, but Rämgård already sees a dream breakthrough ahead: To create an international research centre in Malmö that actively promotes democratic, sustainable societies and to which citizens and civil society can also turn for research support.
