Dr. Maxwell Kennel

Senior Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies

Director of Pandora Press and Editor of the Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies Series.

Co-Investigator on the CREATE Project and Affiliate at the Arcand Centre for Health Equity at NOSM University.

Author of Postsecular History (Palgrave, 2022) and Ontologies of Violence (Brill, 2023), and editor of Astrid von Schlachta’s Anabaptists. Trans. Vic Thiessen (Pandora, 2024), and Robert Friedmann’s Design for Living (Wipf & Stock, 2017).

Social Accountability Fellowship at UBUNTU 2024 and published online (September 2024)

From mid-2023 to August 2024 I was the co-cordinator, with Nick Torres, of the inaugural Social Accountability Fellowship – co-sponsored by Sponsored by The Network: TUFH and NOSM University’s Dr. Gilles Arcand Centre for Health Equity.

The goal of the fellowship was to help deans of medical schools from around the world to design and implement social accountability principles and standards in their institutions, all in order to better respond to the priority health needs of the societies, communities, and contexts they are tasked to serve.

Right now (Sept 10, 2024) I’m sitting in on the presentations being made by our fellows at the UBUNTU 2024 conference in Cape Town, South Africa, and the fellows are presenting on various aspects of their projects – and it’s particularly good to see Kathryn Dong from the University of Alberta speaking on the Social Accountability Standards in Canadian accreditation standards!

Many of the contributions have just been published in the most recent issue of the Social Innovations Journal which I introduced and edited. As the editor of the special issue, I would call the proceedings that we published a kind of “dossier” that includes policy briefs and advocacy papers. I’ll also say that a more accurate title for the dossier is “Institutional Journeys toward Social Accountability in Medical and Allied Health Institutions: From Policy Influence to Accreditation Transformation.”

For more details, see below for the titles of the articles, and here for my extended introduction, titled “Institutional Social Accountability from Medical Education to Accreditation and Public Policy” (which publishes aspects of this presentation from January of this year). I’m quite proud of being involved in a truly impactful project that could have positive impacts on the accreditation and institutional cultures of nations around the world, from Pakistan and Yemen, to India and Brazil!

Institutional Social Accountability Journey Articles

  1. “Addressing health inequities through social accountability: A compulsory pathway to universal health coverage: Case of The Faculty of Medicine Ibn El Jazzar of the University of Sousse, Tunisia”
  2. “Using the Indicators for Social Accountability Tool (ISAT) in Health Professions Education to Develop a Social Accountability Action Plan for a Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry”
  3. “Integrating School Health Curriculum in Allied Health Science Programs: A step towards Social Accountability.”
  4. “Advancing Social Accountability in Medical Education: The ISAT Self-Assessment at the Universidad de La Sabana”

Policy Influence Articles 

  1. “Integrating Social Accountability Standards into Medical School Accreditation in India: A Policy Perspective” 
  2. “Advocating for the Dental Council of India to integrate social accountability standards into national accreditation standards for dental colleges”
  3. “Advocating for Social Accountability in Accreditation and Community Engagement at the Faculdade Pernambucana de Saúde in Recife, Brazil.”
  4. “Advocating for the Integration of Social Accountability Standards into Al Nasser University’s Accreditation Process for International Recognition”
  5. “Social accountability, a primary driver for impactful health professions education and universal health coverage: A Policy Brief”