The Global Health Justice Postdoctoral Programme (GHJ), funded by Höppsche Stiftung and directed by Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst and Prof. Dr. Darrel Moellendorf at Goethe University Frankfurt, each year appoints up to two post-doctoral fellows for a full academic year. The Fellows are part of the Frankfurt academic community, especially of the Normative Orders Research Centre.

Questions of health justice have been part of discussions about global justice for a long time, and there are numerous approaches, ranging from deontological to consequentialist ones, to address them. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has added not just some urgency to these questions but also showed how structural asymmetries between (and within) different countries led to highly unequal chances to receive and develop vaccines and to care for basic health needs. It is time for a global debate on global health justice, and the new program set up at Normative Orders aims to help facilitate research conducive to this debate. Many issues need to be explored in this context, not just fair access to medicine but also the nature of transnational structural injustice, gender disparities in health provision, sustainable development goals, climate change and health, the human right to health, etc.

The fellows of the academic year 2025/26 are Derek Andrews and Romina Rekers.

Derek Andrews recently completed his Ph.D. at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. His research interests lie at the intersection of metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of medicine/psychiatry. His dissertation, entitled, “Psychiatric Natural Kinds: Implications for Nosology, Practice, and Policymaking", consists of a novel account of the metaphysics of mental disorders and a critical examination of the application of inductive inferences made on the basis of natural kind membership in health care policymaking. Andrews' current project aims to investigate the role of disease concepts in the formulation of health care policy and the injustices that may arise as a result of conflicts between disease concepts employed within and across institutional contexts. His research seeks to determine whether and to what extent these concepts align, in order to answer questions such as: In light of what narratives or norms are particular disease concepts employed? How does this vary across contexts and institutions? And how can this go wrong, what injustices does this create, and how ought these be addressed? Andrews contends that resolving at least some issues of injustice in health care will require recognizing that there is no single concept of disease that can serve legitimate strategic aims across contexts, applying the concept of disease only in those contexts in which it serves legitimate strategic aims, and ensuring that the concept of disease employed in policy tracks the relevant legitimate strategic aims of stakeholders.

Dr Romina Rekers is a scholar with an interdisciplinary profile at the intersection of law, philosophy, and bioethics. She has held research appointments in Argentina, Austria, and Germany. She leads the project A Political Conception of Transitional Justice, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Graz, and also serves as principal investigator on WHO- and Oxford-Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE) funded projects on climate-health ethics. Her work has been supported by CONICET (Argentina), the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). She is also a mentor and researcher in the FLACSO-Fogarty Bioethics Programme for Latin America and an associated member of the Climate Change Field of Excellence at the University of Graz. From July 2022 to October 2023, Dr Rekers took a career break for maternity leave.

Current research:

In addressing the challenges posed by infectious diseases (IDs) to the human right to health, there are two aspects to consider: its content and its justification. This project addresses the question on how the transnational and intergenerational nature of IDs should reshape the content of the human right to health. Identifying the content of the human right to health requires determining what is the protected interest and what is the threat(s), what are the threats against which it protects us, or what are the thresholds to be reached in order to protect these interests. This task also involves questions about the concrete rights and duties, the duty to protect/guarantee, negative and positive duties, and the level of protection required.