Summer School
Call for Applications
(Deadline: February 15, 2026)
24th univie: summer school – Scientific World Conceptions (USS-SWC)
GLOBAL HEALTH
Vienna, July 6-10, 2026
https://summerschool-ivc.univie.ac.at/
Course Description
‘Global health’ has attracted wide attention. This program will explore this interdisciplinary topic from a variety different but interrelated perspectives. First, global health reveals significant health disparities: but what causes these, and which disparities are unjust and demand redress? How types of social oppression – such as, racism and heterosexism – relate to health injustices will be explored, alongside investigating the contentious role of advocacy in public health.
Second, global health reveals dilemmas between individual rights and communal benefits. For example, clinical trials funded by Western pharmaceutical companies benefit and exploit participants in low-income countries; measures to control the spread of Covid-19 protected and restricted individuals; and international differences in assisted dying legislation largely depend on how much a jurisdiction values individual autonomy. Such dilemmas are viewed through a philosophical bioethics/public health ethics lens.
Third, global health will be explored from a sociological and humanistic perspective, emphasizing how health is shaped by global interdependencies, power relations, and cultural meanings. Moving beyond biomedical paradigms, the sociology of health can highlight the social, political, and epistemological dimensions of illness, care, and inequality. In addition, Graphic Medicine as an innovative visual and narrative approach to representing experiences of vulnerability and global crisis, will be introduced.
Topics will be selected reflecting participants’ interests and may include:
· History of efforts to account for what causes public health disparities, and what makes a disparity an injustice/inequity in need of intervention
· Efforts to theorize how various types of social oppression relate to health injustices and the amelioration of those injustices
· Role of advocacy in public health, including limits on the roles of public health experts in crafting social policies around issues such as immigration and climate change
· Ethics of clinical trials by Western pharmaceutical companies that take place in low-income countries
· Justification for liberty-limiting measures to control the spread of Covid-19 around the globe
· International differences in forms of assisted dying and which, if any, are justifiable.
· The conceptual evolution from Public Health to One Health and Planetary Health, focusing on how sociological approaches reframe health as a relational and systemic phenomenon
· Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, questioning how global health reproduces colonial hierarchies and epistemic injustices
· Visual storytelling: how comics and graphic narratives contribute to understanding emotional labour, care, and social inequality in health
Lecturers:
Stephen Holland (University of York)
Stephen Holland is a Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Health Sciences, University of York.
Stephen’s main research interests are in ethics, including moral and political philosophy, bioethics, and public health ethics. As well as numerous articles, he is the author of ‘Bioethics: A Philosophical Introduction’ and ‘Public Health Ethics’, both published by Polity, and ‘Ethics and Governance of Public Health Information’, published by Rowman & Littlefield. He is currently working on a book on assisted dying, due to be published by Polity next year.
Veronica Moretti (University of Bologna)
Veronica Moretti is an Associate Professor at the University of Bologna and a member of the University Bioethics Committee. Her main research interests lie in the field of creative and participatory methods within the sociology of health and illness, and in the intersections between technology and human practices, with a specific emphasis on digital health theories.
She is co-coordinator of the ESA Research Network 22 Sociology of Risk and Uncertainties, a board member of the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology (ESHMS), and one of the founders of Graphic Medicine Italia. Her latest publication, The Social Genre of Comics (Palgrave, 2025), investigates how comics can function as a social and epistemological genre within the humanities and social sciences.
Sean A. Valles (Michigan State University)
Sean A. Valles, PhD, is Professor and Director of the Michigan State University Center for Bioethics and Social Justice and Director of Learning Environment for the College of Human Medicine.
Dr. Valles is a philosopher of health specializing in the ethical and evidentiary complexities of how social contexts combine to create patterns of inequitable health disparities. His work includes studying the challenges of responsibly using race and ethnicity concepts in monitoring health disparities, scrutinizing the rhetoric of the COVID-19 pandemic as an ‘unprecedented’ problem that could not be prepared for, and examining how biomedicine meshes with public health and population health.
Dr. Valles is author of the 2018 book “Philosophy of Population Health: Philosophy for a New Public Health Era.” He is also co-editor of the Oxford University Press book series "Bioethics for Social Justice.” Dr. Valles received his PhD in history and philosophy of science from Indiana University Bloomington.
Application form and further information:
https://summerschool-ivc.univie.ac.at/application/
USS-SWC operates under the academic supervision of an International Program Committee of distinguished philosophers, historians, and scientists. Its members represent the scientific fields in the scope of USS-SWC, make contact to their home universities and will also support acknowledgement of courses taken by the students. The annual summer school is organised by the Institute Vienna Circle of the University of Vienna.
https://wienerkreis.univie.ac.at/
Find information about our exchange programme with Duke University (North
Carolina) here:
Inquiries:
Administrator:
Zarah Weiss
Institute Vienna Circle
Alser Straße 23/32
1080 Wien
Scientific director:
Georg Schiemer
Institute Vienna Circle
Alser Straße 23/32
1080 Wien