Erica Nelson is a historian and anthropologist with two decades of experience working on issues of community-based public health, health systems development, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and the politics of knowledge in health research.

Her work focusses on the entangling of past and present, with a particular focus on critical examination of the unequal power dynamics and hierarchies of knowledge in global health and development as they have been shaped over time. She is a research fellow within the IDS Health and Nutrition Cluster and affiliate member of the Participation, Inclusion and Social Change Cluster.

Currently her efforts focus on: 1) integrating historical perspectives to research on development and international health cooperation (the AHRC-funded ‘Remembering and Acting on Malnutrition’ project; the British Library of Development Studies Legacy Collection, and the IFPRI-SPEAR funded work on histories of global nutrition 2) exploring dynamics of trust and brokerage in frontline health services and community-based health and food equity interventions (T-AP funded ‘Building Back Better from Below’); and 3) enabling community engagement and involvement in accountability, governance, and research processes in 21st global/local health and development (ongoing work with the National Institute of Health Research; forthcoming work on digital health governance transformation labs).  She is a member of the NIHR’s Community Engagement and Involvement Expert Advisory Committee and of the WHO’s CoP on Social Accountability in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. She is co-lead of the History Group of the Social Science Approaches for Research and Engagement in Health Policy and Systems (SHAPES) of Health Systems Global.

She has previously worked as a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Centre for History in Public Health with a Wellcome Trust-funded project focussing on the historical development of community health worker programmes in Colombia (2018-2021). She has also contributed to the development of a four-year, multi-country adolescent sexual and reproductive health research intervention as a post-doc in medical anthropology at the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (2010-2014). In addition to academic pursuits, she has consulted for the World Health Organization’s Reproductive Health and Research programme, for UCL Consultants, Options Consultancy and has worked at MSI Reproductive Choices.

She currently lectures on the Gender, Identity and Inclusion module; Ideas in Development module; and the Health and Development module. She co-convenes the Power and Social Perspectives in Development module with Marina Apgar. She is a guest lecturer at LSHTM and UCL, and a distance learning tutor for the Master’s in Public Health course at LSHTM.

Erica also co-convenes the IDS training course Empowering community engagement and involvement in global health research.

PhD supervision

Erica is interested in prospective doctoral students who wish to work on issues of community-engaged and participatory approaches to health research, historically-informed approaches to development and global health research, and/or the politics of knowledge in health research. Relatedly, she would welcome hearing from students interested in taking a long-view of any sub-field of sexual and reproductive health and rights (policies, programmes, discourse, practice).

Erica’s research interests are:

• The Politics of Knowledge – Questions of Epistemic Justice in Global Health and Public Health
• Community Engagement and Involvement and Social Participation in Health Research as Emerging Fields of Research Inquiry
• Critical Histories of International Development, Global Health and/or Nutrition
• Social Accountability in Health – Sexual and Reproductive Health, Maternal Child Health, Family Planning – or in the field of public health nutrition
• Health Equity and health policy and systems focussed research that focusses on dynamics of power and hierarchies of knowledge – including in the UK
• Latin American-specific research on any public health or nutrition topic, or on the politics of international development in the region

She specialises in the following methodologies:

• Development humanities
• History (archives, oral history, ethnography, non-traditional participatory historical approaches)
• Anthropology (medical anthropology, participatory ethnographic methods)
• Participatory action research (social participation in health)
• Accompanied learning processes

She has significant geographic experience in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Nicaragua and Chile.

She has carried out partnership work in Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda, Mozambique, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, UK.

Her institutional expertise includes he World Health Organization, international SRHR organisations, Rockefeller Foundation

Erica’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erica-nelson-07a7a8288/