Stelt zich voor Nadine Blankvoort JUNIOR RESEARCHER EXHALE Breathing new life into Indian cooking! My name is Nadine Blankvoort and I am a member of the project team ‘Health in Slums’, which is a joint team consisting of professionals from Maastricht University and Zuyd University of Applied Sciences. I grew up in Canada where I completed my Bachelor of Psychology in Winnipeg, Canada and following that completed my Master of Medical Rehabilitation in Occupational Therapy. Following my education I worked in the hospital environment in diverse areas of rehabilitation such as geriatrics, neurology and stroke, acute care, emergency medicine and cardiac surgery. In 2012, I came to the Netherlands and completed the Global Health Masters where I took the elective ‘Innovations in Global Health’. Following a trip to India for the Global Health Symposium I completed my masters thesis in Indonesia on a project entitled ‘The Embodied Experiences of Stroke Rehabilitation in Indonesia’. Since graduating from the masters program, I have been working as an instructor in the global health program, as well as assisted on a research project on Point of Care testing in South Africa. As of September I continue to teach in the Global Health department, and will now begin my appointment as part of the Health in Slums team. Health in Slums aims to conduct projects on health issues currently existing in slums, and we aim to focus on a broad area of topics. Our first topic within our research group is Project Exhale, a project aimed at tackling the negative health effects caused by indoor cooking in urban slums in India. Our project team has decided to take a unique approach to this issue. We have recognized that there are many working in the field of clean cooking technology, yet a small number of these technologies are actually implemented, and when they are, not on a large, and long-lasting scale. The lack of adopting of innovations is linked to the fact that they are often designed outside of a context, in this case the urban slum, and delivered into the context, without acknowledging the complex context and needs of the end users that affect the how and whether the technology is used. This leaves a lack of a “fit” between the technology, the user, and the context. Therefore, we aim to produce a solution to indoor cooking with the individuals in the slums, using a co-production approach, this way increasing the relevance and fit between the technology and the end user. To carry out this process we have first sent two students from the Global Health Masters to Bangalore, to investigate cooking practices. They conducted an ethnographic study where they found the complex needs, social, traditional, cultural, gender and infrastructure factors that all must be considered when implementing a change in cooking practices. From this, we aim to return at the start of next year, to conduct a field visit where we will start the process of co-production. This will involve an iterative process of cooking on traditional stoves, and having slum dwellers, along with teams of engineers, global health professionals and technological designers, identify small changes that can be made. These small changes will again be tested through cooking and this process will continue until possible solutions in either technology, fuel or practices are identified. Throughout the work of Project Exhale we hope to involve interdisciplinary teams of students, from the Global Health faculty at Maastricht and the allied health professionals faculties, as well as the technology design faculties from the Hogeschool Zuyd. We think this interdisciplinary structure, as well as our co-development approach, will contribute to a rich and interesting project process and India, which will provide us with knowledge on this approach that can be applied to future projects within Health in Slums. More information on www.healthinslums.com 9 op één lijn 50
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