Our Hub Coordinator in Alnarp

Hi Amanda, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Working with urban health issues relates nicely to my current roles as a lecturer in environmental psychology. I am a course leader of three Master courses at the program ‘Outdoor environments for health and wellbeing’.

As research assistant I am currently engaging in some interdisciplinary research projects related to children’s outdoor place experiences and architecture. The main research projects I am involved right now are the European Nature-Based Solutions Horizon project REGREEN and the FORMAS financed research project HUS, in Umeå.

I co-produce the environmental psychology podcast Human Land, which aims at exploring topics related to health and landscapes in a salutogenic perspective to promote planetary health. At SLU Landscape I am co-leading the initiative SLU Teaching Synergy Forum, where we aim to promote modern and collaborative teaching situations at SLU Landscape.

I have an interdisciplinary background in humanities and the social sciences, with a Master in Outdoor environments for health and wellbeing, at SLU, a Master in Media and Communication from Malmö University, and a Bachelor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and University of Campinas, in Brazil.

I have also a very long pedagogical experience, as I worked as a teacher in many different subjects, socio-economic groups, in different countries, with preschool children to adults.

What are your assignments at the platform?

At the platform, I will thematically work with urban healthscapes. The overall aim is to strengthen and develop SLU’s capacities and potentials in the field of urban health and cultivate a strong funding prone theme. At SLU Urban Futures we aim to foster critical inter- and transdisciplinary research and knowledge production that supports urban sustainability by an inclusion of future generations wellbeing, an equity perspective, and by exploring and fostering human-nature relationships.

Therefore I will explore the urban healthscapes discourse at SLU by learning about SLU´s research perspectives, creating opportunities for networking and collaboration, issue seed funding, and facilitate activities and events that relate to and develop urban healthscapes.

 
Which topics or areas engage you the most?

I am very interested into how qualitative social and psychological transdisciplinary approaches can enrich a new understanding of health research. I am very interested in the understanding of use and experiences of places, and how we can apply an environmental psychology and salutogenic health perspective for urban health.