UVa Center for Social Medicine: Establishing a Community-Based Participatory Health Research Center in Southwestern Uganda

The UVa Center for Social Medicine will bring together faculty and students from the University of Virginia and Mbarara University of Science and Technology to imagine a new approach to access to healthcare. In contrast to research approaches that have focused on lack, we aim to engage African healthcare as a site of innovation, creativity, and resilience. By focusing not on what Ugandans do not have and are not doing, and instead shifting our gaze to what they do have and what they are doing, our research will tap local knowledge and expertise in order to envision access to care under a new lens. This grant underwrites the Center's start-up costs, including a summer research-training program in community-based participatory research in Uganda during Summer 2020.