Monica Berger González
I was at the Td Lab from 2012 to 2015, where I worked on the Project "Maya and Contemporary Conceptions of Cancer" (MACOCC). This was an intercultural Transdisciplinary process aiming to facilitate knowledge co-production and mutual learning around medical knowledge of cancer. My role was to set up a medical anthropological approach to facilitate interaction between epistemologies of Maya traditional healers, oncologists from Guatemala, and scientists from European academia (external pageSee YouTube movie). I learned about the benefits of TD in leveling the field for interactions at equal footing, particularly in contexts with extreme power differentials, but also learned about the limitations of following these approaches amidst such disparate sociocultural systems, which also present great opportunities for innovation. For the past three years I am working in the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Unit of Human and Animal Health, applying a TD approach to research the burden of zoonotic disease in Maya communities, working hand in hand with the Public Health System in Guatemala towards more sensitive surveillance and response. We continue to develop new tools to facilitate TD in a complex Global South setting (external pageSee YouTube movie). Thank's to what I have learned in the TdLab and in Switzerland I am now able to create a TD group in Universidad del Valle de Guatemala that proposes to support necessary paradigm shifts in applied collaborative scientific research for societal transformations.