Apply to the ACCESS courses for PhD students!
Below you can find information about our four upcoming PhD student courses for 2024. All courses will be given in English and are open to PhD students at all ACCESS institutions. All courses will be 5 full-time weeks in length and will be worth 7.5 ECTS.
Epidemiological assessment of health effects from chemical exposure
Course description:
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) require establishing strategies for environmental protection that also translate into improved quality of life for people and better health. The SDG goal foresees rethinking food production systems. These SDGs aim to improve global sustainable food consumption and production patterns (SDG12), as well as consumers' good health and well-being (SDG 3), and ensure access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food (SDG2). To advance the fulfillment of these SDGs, as well as others linking environmental quality and health (SDG 3 and 11), environmental epidemiology and human toxicology align with fundamental concepts and applications reviewed in this course.
The course is designed for graduate students to understand the scope of environmental exposure to chemicals and their health implications. The contents are divided into fundamental concepts of toxicology and environmental epidemiology.
Our objective is to share methods and applications for chemical exposure assessment, and environmental epidemiological research based on real cases, using the complementary expertise of our two research groups. Our proposal is to develop a teaching and learning process based on interdisciplinary, multicultural, and learning objectives focused on the students. Teaching resources include presentations, videos, flipped classrooms, group work, personal readings, and the use of different digital tools.
Course period:
September 23 to October 25, 2024
Course location:
Online
Entry Requirements:
English 6 / English B and 120 first or second cycle credits.
Information about the application process:
Registration for the course is now closed.
Meet the course convenors:
Sandra Cortés, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Sandra Cortés Arancibia is an Associate Professor of the Department of Public Health of the School of Medicine of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She is Associate Researcher of the Advanced Center for Chronic Diseases IA Sandra Cortés - CEDEUS and the Centro de Desarrollo Urbano Sustentable IA Sandra Cortés - CEDEUS. Both are advanced research centers funded by the National Research and Development Agency of the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation. Her research is focused in environmental and occupational epidemiology, health risk assessments for environmental contaminants, exposure studies to chemical contaminants (metals, pesticides, other chemicals), and studies on zoonotic diseases.
Annette Krais, Lund University
Annette Krais is Associate Professor at the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Lund University, Sweden. Her research focuses on the analysis of environmental pollutants in human samples, using mass spectrometry. She studies biomarkers of indoor as well as outdoor pollutants, ranging from phthalates to pesticides. Annette is also involved in measuring biomarkers in human exposure studies and occupational exposed workers.
Collaborative research methodologies for sustainability studies with focus on SDGs 13, 14, 15
Course description:
Knowledge co-creation through collaborative methodologies has gained traction in sustainability studies. The intersection of climate and environmental change with concerns for social and environmental justice necessitates an exchange of information in the design and conduct of interventions. Parallel to the role of basic research and expert knowledge, inclusion of local stakeholder experiences through co-creation of research is key to ensuring that results represent experienced realities, are relevant to the context and sufficiently address issues of justice and equity.
Collaborative research practices differ not only in the forms of stakeholder engagement but also in the timing of the engagement, as well as the underlying reasons for interaction. Some researchers engage with stakeholders mainly as a means of acquiring representative data, others include stakeholders in the research design, sometimes even as co-applicants.
Conducting collaborative research is challenging and affected by structural barriers. Deeper stakeholder engagement is time-demanding and requires a fundamental understanding of risks and opportunities in particularsituations.Inresponse,thiscourseaimstoprovidetheoretical and methodologicalunderpinningsto conductcollaborative research on Climate Action (SDG 13), Life below Water (SDG 14) and Life on Land (SDG 15) in ways that safeguard scientific quality and democratic engagement in science.
Course period:
The course is divided in two modules, both online. The first part will be held 2 April to 3 May 2024. The second part will be given in the period 2-31 October 2024. The reason for this division is to provide the PHD candidates and supervisors time to test the learnings in fieldwork, organized within or additional to the candidate's ordinary project work.
Course location:
Online
Entry Requirements:
Priority will be given to PhD students or researchers in Environmental or Sustainability Studies (or equivalent) at ACCESS universities. The minimum entry requirement is a Master’s degree in these (or equivalent) subjects.
Information about the application process:
Registration for the course is now closed.
Meet the course convenors:
Marco Billi, Universidad de Chile
Dr. Marco Billi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Rural Management and Innovation, Faculty of Agronomic Sciences, University of Chile. He has a degree in Economics from the Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan, Italy, and a master's degree in Systemic Analysis applied to Society from the University of Chile. He obtained his doctorate in Political Processes and Institutions at the Adolfo Ibáñez University, Chile. His interests are oriented toward research and consulting, particularly on issues related to climate change, sustainable development, inclusion, and inequality. He has experience in the design and application of social surveys, in the coordination of teams and qualitative and quantitative research projects. He conducts his postdoctoral research at the (CR)² on the articulation of governance elements in Chile, for the identification of a coherent governance model.
Roxana Borquez, Universidad de Chile
Dr. Roxana Borquez is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Rural Management and Innovation, Faculty of Agronomic Sciences, Universidad de Chile. She is also a Natural Resources Engineer from the University of Chile, a Master in Management and Public Policy from the same university, and a PhD in Geography and Policy Studies from King's College London, United Kingdom. She has 14 years of experience as a researcher and consultant, working with national and international teams. Her research has been focused on knowledge co-production, the science-politics-society interface and governance in areas such as adaptation and resilience to climate change, water, glaciers and energy.
Tomas Kjellqvist, Södertörn University
Tomas Kjellqvist is a researcher and manager at SustainLab SH, Södertörn University in the South of Stockholm, Sweden. His main research area is on Innovations for Sustainable Development. In this area he has experiences of working transdisciplinary in Bolivia, Tanzania and Rwanda by linking academic researchers with clusters of small and sized enterprizes . In Sweden he has conducted research on Citizen Science methods for the social sciences. He also has experiences from the Unesco Man and Biosphere program and from Unesco´s work on Sustainability Sciences. One recent contribution in this field is a project on teaching methods in systems thinking for sustainbility.
Michael Gilek, Södertörn University
Michael Gilek is professor in Environmental Science at Södertörn University Sweden. His research focuses on marine environmental governance, risk governance and coastal sustainability. In ongoing research projects Michael analyses how conflicts relating to use, interest, identity, justice etc. are addressed in marine and coastal governance. Collaborative and transdisciplinary approaches building on stakeholder collaboration and knowledge-to-action is a key component of his research.
Contact us:
Marco Billi, Universidad de Chile (marcobilli@uchile.cl)
Roxana Borquez, Universidad de Chile (roborquez@gmail.com)
Tomas Kjellqvist, Södertörn University (tomas.kjellqvist@sh.se)
Michael Gilek, Södertörn University (michael.gilek@sh.se)
Ecological Principles for Sustainable Weed Management
Course description:
Simplified agricultural production systems with excessive use of pesticides has led to a cascade of complex problems in todays’ agroecosystems and beyond. This is including the rapid spread of herbicide resistant weed populations, pesticide contamination of the environment and food chain, health risks to pesticide users and consumers as well as a tremendous loss of biodiversity. Todays weed communities are dominated by a few highly adapted species that are difficult to manage with strategies that are solely based on direct means for weed control.
This course offers a synthesis of key functional traits of arable plants in general and agricultural and environmental weeds in particular. It will provide a comprehensive understanding of ecological principles that can be utilised for supporting sustainable weed management practices. Factors and processes affecting the environmental, economic and social sustainability of weed management strategies are discussed across scales. Economic, political and social constraints of weed management are integrated, providing a detailed comparative overview on the current and future regulatory framework in Sweden and Chile. The course presents a review of the relevant theoretical basis in ecological weed management and a set of specific examples for annual and perennial production systems.
Course period:
May 20 to June 9, 2024
Course location:
This course will be conducted as a hybrid course.
Students will meet online from May 20 - 31, 2024 and in person in Uppsala, Sweden, from June 3 - 9, 2024.
Entry Requirements:
The course is open to all students interested in deepening their knowledge sustainable management of unwanted vegetation. We are aiming for an interdisciplinary teaching and learning environment, encouraging students from a wide range of scientific disciplines to apply for the course. This is including, ecology, agronomy, forestry, horticulture, viticulture, biology, environmental sciences or any adjacent scientific areas.
Priority will be given to PhD students or postdoctoral researchers at ACCESS partner universities, the minimum entry requirement is a Master’s degree in one of the aforementioned (or equivalent) subject areas. English level 6/B.
Information about the application process:
Registration for this course is now closed.
Meet the course convenors:
Rodrigo Figueroa Espinoza, Pontificia Universidad Católica De Chile
Dr. Rodrigo Figueroa is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Systems at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. My field of action is plant protection; mainly weed ecology and management in crops, vegetables, orchards and forestry. My research is oriented to the development of ecological weed control tactics that try to minimize the use of pesticides and environmental risk. We are currently leading research with new herbicide alternatives, and field trials to assess biodiversity impact of fruit orchards and vineyards using cover crops. In my lab we have been studying, for several years, how weed management in forestry may affect honeybees' hives.
Alexander Menegat, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Alexander is Associate Professor at the Department of Crop Production Ecology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala. His research focuses on plant ecological weed management and cropping system diversification. Aim of his research is to improve our understanding of the mechanisms and interactions within agro-ecosystems and to develop cropping systems based on the systematic and integrated use of ecological mechanisms rather than direct interventions such as herbicides and fertilisers.
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Social (in)justice, Indigeneity and Sustainable Future(s) in Chile and Sweden
Course description:
Chilean and Sweden’s indigenous communities share a history of dispossession, displacement, and erasure, coupled with non-recognition of rights. In fact, modernity’s achievements are inseparable from racism, hetero-patriarchy, economic exploitation, and discrimination of non-European knowledge systems. Our course explores how unjust expropriation of human environments and natural resources have consequences for sustainable development and multilingual communities (SDG: 11). Besides, it focuses on how preserving indigenous people’s culture, languages, and knowledge systems helps in raising awareness towards well-being (SDGs: 3, 14, 15). We draw on an ideological framework that indigenous cosmovision has provided for sustainability, which incorporates an ethics and behaviour code related to the protection of critical elements such as land and water.
Building on interdisciplinary feminist and decolonial thinkers, the course interrogates the intersections between state and the market and their potential effects on marginalised communities (SDG: 16). Furthermore, the historical recognition of indigenous epistemes incorporates the contributions of minoritized multilingual communities towards social justice, equitability and sustainability (SDG: 3; 16). The course addresses the marginalization of heritage languages and their speakers, through the ascendancy of dominant languages in the public domain. The course is guided by a central question: how do we improve our societies’ productive potential while ensuring equitable opportunities for all?
Course period:
October 1, 2024 to January 10, 2025
Course location:
Online
Entry Requirements:
Master’s degree
Information about the application process:
Registration for the course will open on January 8, 2024 and the deadline will be May 31, 2024. You can now register online using this form: https://forms.gle/34Q1QyvcMFTbhzim6
Meet the course convenors:
Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, Uppsala University
After completing her Bachelors (University of Delhi), Masters (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi), and Master of Philosophy (Cambridge University, UK), degrees, she completed a PhD at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick in 1997. She held teaching and research positions at the Development Studies and Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science and Department of Sociology, University of Warwick before joining the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol as tenured faculty in 2010. Her research trajectories cover the following areas: Gendered Discourses of Colonialism and Nationalism, Gendered Violence in India and Europe, Ethnicity, Social Capital and Social Exclusion, Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Qualitative Feminist Research Methodologies. Her first book Women in the Indian Nationalist Movement: Unseen Faces: Unheard Voices, 1925-1942 (2006) was reprinted in 2015 as a Sage Classic. She has recently co-edited a book, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice with Routledge, UK (2021). She is the recipient of many research awards including university research award (Kraftpaket för Jämställdhet) at Uppsala University in 2012. She has completed four Swedish Research Council funded projects on Civil Society and Deliberative Democracy(2015-2017), The Paradoxes of Empowerment - Employment Guarantee, Women and Dalits in India (2016-2019), From Waste to Profit: Gender, Bio-politics and Neo-liberalism in Indian Commercial Surrogacy (2017-2020) and Understanding Racism in Healthcare: Developing and implementing anti-racist strategies through shared knowledge production and evaluation (2018-2021). This research has been published in leading journals such as such as Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, The Sociological Review, Sociology, Journal of Gender Studies, Development in Practice, Development and Change, Contemporary South Asia, Women’s History Review, International Journal of Social Research Methodology and World Development. The interdisciplinary approaches and transnational contexts that inspire her research also propel her independent and collaborative teaching, having designed, administered, taught and evaluated courses for a diverse and global group of students: undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral, mature students, exchange students, students with learning difficulties and traditionally under-represented groups. Her teaching covers areas such as postcolonial approaches to gender and development, globalisation, feminism and transnationalism, nationalism and colonialism, racism, health and illness, power and violence feminist methodologies and knowledge production.
Alicia Salomone, Universidad de Chile
Alicia Salomone has an interdisciplinary background that combines Literature (PhD), History (BA & MA) and English (MA). Since 2001, she has been a lecturer at Universidad de Chile where she has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in topics such as cultural and postcolonial studies, memory studies, and Latin American women’s writing and poetry. Alicia has supervised six postdoctoral research projects, eleven doctoral thesis and more than 40 master dissertations. For the past twenty years, she has been granted on various occasions by the National Agency for Research (Chile) to carry out research in her areas of specialisation; she has also participated in international projects granted by Argentine and Spanish state research agencies. In terms of publications and citations, her book from her doctoral dissertation, Alfonsina Storni. Mujeres, modernidad y literatura (2006) [Alfonsina Storni. Women, modernity and literature], has been acknowledged as a substantial contribution to women’s literature in Argentina. She has also edited ten volumes related to her fields of work, among which the more recent are Memorias culturales y urgencias del presente. Prácticas estético-políticas en Chile, Argentina, Uruguay y Colombia [Cultural memories and urgencies of the present time. Aesthetic and political practices in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia] (2022) and Memoria e imaginación poética en el Cono Sur, 1960-2010 [Memory and poetic imagination in the Southern Cone of America, 1960-2010]. Between 2019 and 2021 Alicia served as a member of the Executive Board of Memory Studies Association, becoming part of MSA’s Advisory Board since 2022 to the present.
Rakel Österberg, Stockholm University
Rakel Österberg worked several years, as a certified teacher in Spanish and French in lower and upper secondary schools. She graduated in 2008 in Spanish linguistics at Stockholm University with her doctoral thesis Motivación, aptitud y desarrollo estructural: Un estudio sobre la actuación lingüística en aprendientes suecos de español L2. After completing her PhD, she spent the next three years at the Department of Language Education at Stockholm University, where she was in charge of the new Teacher Training Programme, which was reformed in 2010. Besides the responsibilities of managing teaching staff, she participated in the organization of the faculty structures concerning the implementation of the new teacher programmes as a Director of Studies and later on as Assistant Head of Department. She returned to the Department of Romance Studies and Classics in 2013, where she currently holds a teaching and research position, delivering courses in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Spanish grammar, linguistics, mediation, academic writing and language education. She supervises student theses at Bachelor and Master level. Additionally, she has been directing thesis at the post-graduate level, both at Stockholm University and at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is also engaged in different international exchanges. Her research is situated in the field of SLA, with a special interest in motivation, multilingualism and educational research. She participated in the Swedish Research funded project TAL 2015-2019 (Teaching, Assessment and Learning). At present, she is engaged in the research project "Spanish as a Heritage Language in Sweden". She is the co-author of Bonniers Spanish Grammar, first published in 2004. She has published her research in International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, Languages, Journal of Spanish Language Teaching and The WAC Clearinghouse.
Contact us:
Suruchi Thapar-Björkert: suruchi.thapar-bjorkert@statsvet.uu.se
Alicia Salomone: alicia.salomone@u.uchile.cl
Rakel Österberg: rakel.osterberg@su.se