 Helle is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. Her PhD work takes place in Greenland and Nunavut focusing on how Canadian Inuit and Greenlanders who are nursing students and practicing nurses experience and negotiate their roles in educational and health systems developed and governed by Euro-Canadians and Danes respectively, according to southern doctrine and culture, in English or Danish, while living and practicing in northern settings and cultures serving mostly Greenlanders and Inuit who speak mainly Greenlandic and Inuktitut.
Helle is also a nurse and has worked in Denmark in various specialties including psychiatry, neurology and emergency interspersed with travelling in Southeast Asia, Canada and Australia.
In 1997 Helle moved to Nunavut to work as a community nurse and worked with TB until 1999. Later she returned as a consultant for the TB program at the Department of Health and Social Services in the Government of Nunavut.
Helle completed her BSc in Nursing and BA in Anthropology at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay and completed a Masters of Science in Anthropology at Copenhagen University in the spring of 2005. She taught medical interpreters in the language and culture program at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, and updated the medical modules for the program during 2003-04.
Helle’s master’s work focused on the socio-cultural experiences of TB in Nunavut. This was a qualitative study involving ethnographic research methods, carried out through 7 months of fieldwork between September 2003 and November 2004. Fieldwork was interspersed with data analysis and presentations of preliminary findings to different groups in the communities where the research took place.
Helle is associated with the Department of Anthropology at Lakehead University where she has taught topics related to medical anthropology and the historical, social and political issues of health and healthcare in the Arctic, nationally (Canada) and internationally.
Broadly, Helle’s research interests are the function of healthcare systems; the education of healthcare professionals; the effects of colonization and colonialism on population health and well being; the socio-cultural and political aspects of health, health care and health education; and how these work as determinants of health.
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