An Emerging Voice Goes to Europe
-Lalit Narayan, PhD Student, Anthropology
A few months ago I was selected to be an ‘Emerging Voice’
based on an essay competition organized by the Institute of Tropical Medicine
(ITM) in Antwerp, Belgium. For some time now ITM has been focusing on
strengthening health systems research capacity in the Global South. They view
this process as ‘bridging the poles’ in order to balance the current domination
of Western viewpoints in the global health arena. The Emerging Voices essay
competition was aimed at recognizing young researchers from low and middle
income countries who were working on innovative issues and providing them with
support and mentorship in order to enable them to be better seen and heard in
academic and policy circles. The end goals were to move us towards publishing
our essays in a peer-reviewed journal as well as allowing us to attend the
First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research.
My essay was on language barriers in health care settings in
India, a topic that I first became interested in during my medical studies in
the cosmopolitan city of Bangalore in South India. There we practiced a
medicine embedded within the English language in a multi-lingual setting where
often patients and doctors did not speak each other’s languages. Yet research
into such issues or any attempt at providing organized translation services was
more or less unheard of.
During the first two weeks of November, 52 of us Emerging
Voices from 29 low and middle income countries got the opportunity to travel to
Antwerp, Belgium to participate in a training workshop on academic writing and
presentation skills. At the end of the two weeks we got to present our research
topics at the ITM Annual Colloquium. We were encouraged to use a new style of
presentation known as Pecha Kucha in which 20 image rich slides automatically
advance every 20 seconds. Our resulting presentations which had to be carefully
choreographed were the highlight of the colloquium and the feedback we received
was useful in expanding our research themes.
The next week we all bused down to Montreux, Switzerland for
the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, a highly profile event
attended by many major academic institutions, funders and international
agencies. Seventeen Emerging Voices were selected to present at two sessions
within the symposium. I was served as one of three Emerging Voices who were to
provide feedback at the closing plenary. Overall the efforts of ITM created a
structured program by which we Emerging Voices could navigate the worlds of
academic publishing and international conferences. More importantly, they
created a network of young researchers from the Global South who normally would
not have been able to get to know each other, share ideas and collaborate on
research and advocacy.