Dear Dr. Springett:
My name is José Carlos Suárez. I’m a Public Health Ph.D. student specialized in Health Promotion at the University of Montreal. My project director is Louise Potvin. We met last October, in Montreal, during your visit at our department.
As a doctorate student in Public Health, I find your work to be of the utmost importance for the structuring of Health Promotion discourse. I truly appreciate the facts that you give significant importance to evaluation methodology and lay perspectives on health. I also support your efforts for a better understanding of the processes related to the community regeneration and development movements, and, finally, how you try to avoid simplistic interpretations of the links from causes to effects.
The line of thought which interests me the most among your impressive work is the one concerning the contribution of participatory evaluation research to the structuration of discourse in health promotion.
I would like to develop a heuristic and hermeneutical approach of participatory evaluation research (PER) to explore the power relationships and the contradictions of policy and research on community competencies, social self-organization and self-learning.
I would like also to give some thought on the importance and power of knowledge, dialogue and language for communities involved in social health movements as a dialectic relationship between social structures (system), agency (competences), and social actors (individuals and groups).
The two concepts which I consider interesting to develop are community participation and participatory evaluation research, concepts which you have worked so deeply. And it is on that point that I would like establish the link between my doctoral project and your contributions regarding this subject: participatory and evaluative methodologies in health promotion. This is why it was definitely an excellent idea for Louise Potvin to put us in contact in order to assess the possibility of an internship at your university.
I think we could organize an internship of 4 months in your academic unit according to your availabilities as of September 2005. We could discuss more in the course of the next months for the best moment to visit you. In order to obtain my grant for the costs of the internship, I have to present a little resume of this project before January 31, 2005. I will only need you to provide me with the following two things:
- An admission letter from the academic unit where I will perform my internship.
- A short description about the academic unit where I will perform my internship.
If you need my CV or if you need to speak with Dr. Potvin, we can keep in contact this week.
Also, I keep contact with Dr. Mercado, who has invited me to write a chapter with two others colleagues in his next book about participatory evaluation. I would like organize the second part of my internship in his academic unit, in Guadalajara, Mexico. I know you keep contact with each other and find it very interesting because it will permit me develop a complementary point of view, when combining the experience of the two internships.
I would be pleased to keep in touch with you and start an exchange about the conceptual and operational notions and the importance of the participatory evaluation research to structure the health promotion discourse. This would enable us "to travel" together from description and explanation to reflectivity and dialogue.
Thank you in advance. Do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of service to you. Wishing you a nice week.
Regards,
José Carlos Suárez Herrera, BSc, MPH, MSc
Collaborator professor at the UNESCO Chair of IPD-SILOS
Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Ph.D. Student in Public Health
President of AÉÉSPUM
Department of social and Preventive Medicine
University of Montreal (Québec, Canada)
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