The Oslo Medical Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Agenda for Rethinking Key Concepts in (Global) Health

Among scholars and practitioners of medicine, attention is increasingly being paid to the dynamics of power that operate in the field, including how liberal forms of power have come to dominate the global governance of health. As Engebretsen and Heggen (2015:115) have argued, however, power ‘does not only operate through knowledge and norms but through language and concepts, and often unconsciously’.  Any attempt to redress some of the inequalities that operate in the field of health must therefore begin by questioning the global validity of key concepts that underpin global health policy today, including the concept of global health itself, as articulated in a range of languages. Against this backdrop, SHE, the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education at the University of Oslo, is launching an ambitious programme of research, in collaboration with the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network (see Baker et al. 2021), to encourage conceptual research in the field of modern medicine and global health. The research will draw on a large suite of open access electronic corpora (the Oslo Medical Corpus), accompanied by a novel, open-source corpus analysis and visualization interface, to support a wide range of conceptual studies. 

Engebretsen, E. and K. Heggen (2015) ‘Powerful Concepts of Global Health’, International Journal of Health Policy and Management 4(2): 115–117.

About the Speakers

Eivind Engebretsen is Professor of Global Health and Health Humanities at the University of Oslo. He is currently the Vice-Dean for Postgraduate Studies at the Faculty of Medicine and the Executive Chairman of the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), a centre for excellence with 10-years funding from the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education. Recently, he has also been appointed as Academic Chair of Global Health at the Circle U European University Alliance. Engebretsen has pioneered innovative interdisciplinary approaches to the study of political ideologies (including the SDGs) and knowledge translation in health, drawing on political philosophy, discourse analysis, translation studies, and most recently, corpus-based research. Together with Julia Kristeva, he has also advocated a novel approach to the medical humanities that calls the distinction between medicine and the humanities into question.

Mona Baker is Affiliate Professor at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), University of Oslo, co-cordinator of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network, Director of the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University, and Honorary Dean of the Graduate School of Translation and Interpreting, Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is author of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, and editor of Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (2016; winner of the Inttranews Linguists of the Year award for 2015), and co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media. Her articles have appeared in a wide range of international journals, including Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, Social Movement Studies, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Social Semiotics and The Translator. She posts on translation, citizen media and Palestine on her personal website and tweets at @MonaBaker11.