Healthy Populations Journal

Über die Zeitschrift

The Healthy Populations Journal (HPJ) is a multi-faculty, student-led, open-access, peer-reviewed journal housed at the Healthy Populations Institute (HPI) at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Our mission is to identify and disseminate research which mobilizes evidence to improve population health and global health equity.

Population health is thinking beyond the health of an individual and looking at the health outcomes of a whole community. It considers all the factors that influence the overall health of a specific population including the social and structural conditions in which people are born, work, live, and age.

Differences in the social determinants of health result in health inequities – the unnecessary or unjust conditions that result in differences in people‘s health status or health outcomes.  We can achieve our population health goals by focusing on reducing health inequities, drawing attention to the variety of factors that are known to have impact on individual and community health. The HPJ champions building health equity by disseminating research which addresses the fundamental causes and structural barriers of unhealthy lives and communities around the world. It is imperative that we research the wider determinants of health and create solutions that allow all members of a population to be well.

Latest Publications:

Please take a look at our most recent special issue volume 5, issue 1, in Winter 2025 on Interprofessional Health Education and Collaborative Practice.

A full list of our archived issues are available online, open-access.

News:

We are open to receiving rolling submissions for our regular issues with a cut off date of June 31, 2025 for the Fall 2025 issue. Submissions received after this cutoff date will be considered for our Spring 2026 or Fall 2026 issues depending on capacity. Submission details are outlined here.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Special Issue on Art, Health, and Ways of Knowing 

The student-run Healthy Populations Journal is inviting submission of artistic works or approaches to research that use art at some stage of the research process in a special issue on Art Health and ways of Knowing. Health and health research are broad fields that cover a vast array of topics and approaches spanning from health equity, social determinants, public or population health, or clinical interventions that target specific disease processes. We are seeing submissions that use art as research or research that uses art at some stage of the research process that also: 

1. Demonstrates and/or contemplates the role that art can have in challenging taken-for-granted ways of knowing in Western/European research traditions; 
2. Challenges notions of health that frame it as an individual possession, as something that can be achieved, or as a health/disease presence/absence binary 
3. Expands knowledge about health in the broad field of health research 

Research and inquiries led by graduate students and/or community members who do their work outside of post-secondary institutions that apply anti-colonial, decolonial, anti-racist, anti-ableist, abolitionist, or post-humanist frameworks is welcome and desired. Work that takes seriously the ongoing impacts of settler-colonialism, white supremacist logics, binary logics and ideologies rooted in hate and violence have on health is encouraged. 

Submission types/forms may include but are not limited to: 

• Research-creation(s) or work where art is a method of inquiry/way of knowing 
• Works of poetry, short stories and performances (videos or documentation of) 
• Work rooted in Indigenous perspectives and worldviews 
• Anti-colonial, decolonial, abolitionist and liberatory work 
• Community-based and/or health research that uses art at some stage of the research process 
• Reports, analyses or reflections from or about research that has been presented as artistic creations 
• Commentaries, book reviews or editorials 
• Autoethnographical or autotheoretical work 
• Review protocols, reviews or quantitative work that examines the impact of arts-based research on health outcomes 
• Research that aligns with quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, or post-qualitative paradigms are welcome 

For this special issue, please disregard the general issue cover letter instructions and instead, include with your submission a brief cover letter indicating: 

1. The role of art and the connection to health 
2. The type of work you are submitting (E.g., commentary, poetry, original study, review, etc.) 
3. Three (3) potential reviewers for your work. For artistic submissions where academic peer review would serve as a barrier to submission, in lieu of potential reviewers, please include a list of three (3) other artists or artistic approaches that serve as inspiration for your work.  

Submissions are due by January 31, 2026, by 5 pm AST. If you have any questions, please contact hpj@dal.ca