Apl. Prof. Dr. Carsten Butsch

A total of seven successful acquisitions of third-party funds/award money with a total funding amount of € 1,004,233.

In addition, according to verbal preliminary information, approved (subject to positive vote of the ethics committee at the University of Cologne) DFG grant: Migrant health understandings and practices in diverse neighborhoods (€ 243,149 for 36 months).

University of Cologne, internal funding in the amount of € 15,750.

The project analyses transformation processes in urban fringe areas of Indian metropolitan cities. It aims at understanding how access to water as a consumption good and a resource for livelihoods is changed during the urbanisation process in periurban spaces. The project is structured around 4 research objectives: (1) understanding institutional change of water governance, (2) analysing changing access to water with changing societal structures, (3) analysing livelihood changes during the urban transformation and the resulting changing water demands; (4) Co-developing transformation pathways for sustainable water management in urban fringe areas.
The project is designed as a multi-sited multi-method field study comparing the urban fringe areas of Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad. Through its design, the research contributes understanding into the drivers of vulnerability and resilience of periurban communities, and helps to identify more sustainable future pathways. The project aims at initiating a stakeholder dialogue in all of the three research areas. Workshops will include government agencies, local communities and key scientific experts that bring in further knowledge needed in addition to the knowledge generated by the project researchers.
The project generates new insights on how urbanisation processes take place in India. It identifies pathways towards the development of sustainable future cities as part of the stakeholder dialogue. It contributes to the knowledge on the sustainable use of water as an increasingly scarce resource.

Funded by Belmont Forum/BMBF

Homepage

Migrantische Gesundheitsverständnisse und -praktiken in diversen Quartieren (Migrant understandings of health and their health related practices in diverse neighbourhoods)

Despite the increasing proportion of the population with a migration background in Germany, comparatively little is known about the specific health needs and disease burden of these population groups and their crucial determinants. The same applies to the concrete health practices of migrants, which are significantly shaped by individual cultural understandings of health and have a great influence on health status. The project investigates health practices in migrant urban neighborhoods and aims at the theoretical-conceptual further development of culturally shaped explanatory models of health, illness and healing. From a practice-theoretical perspective, the emergence of "medical diversity," i.e., the development of one's own concepts of health and illness from various existing concepts, as well as the resulting access to and utilization of health services, is examined.

The guiding question is: Why and to what extent do different understandings of health and illness influence migrants' health practices and health care structures? Using a mixed-methods research approach, four thematic complexes are investigated: (1) migrant health practices, (2) culturally shaped understandings of health and illness, (3) migrant "medical diversity" in diverse settings, (4) health practices and structures.

The study will be conducted in the two urban neighborhoods of Bonn Neu-Tannenbusch and Cologne-Mülheim, which are characterized by a high diversity of origin. In three work phases, methods of quantitative and qualitative social research and participatory research will be combined with a sequential integration. Thus, a deeper understanding of migrant health will be gained and a concept for the emergence of health practices in diverse neighborhoods will be developed.