Culture, Health, and Science: A Multidisciplinary Liberal Arts Alternative to the Public Health Major

Since the 2003 call by the Institute of Medicine to educate undergraduates in public health, various models have emerged for incorporating public health into the liberal arts and sciences. One model is a professionalized public health major that uses core public health competencies to prepare a workforce of health professionals. A second model offers a broad-based public health major rooted in liberal arts principles, resisting the utilitarian trend toward human capital formation. A third model resists even the label of “public health,” preferring instead to introduce undergraduates to many ways of analyzing human health and healing. The multidisciplinary Culture, Health, and Science Program, based on six key commitments for preparing liberal arts students to analyze health and respond to global health challenges, is offered as an alternative to the public health major

Strategic Authenticity and Voice: New Ways of Seeing and Being Seen as Young Mothers through Digital Storytelling

This paper presents the Ford Foundation-funded Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice project, which explores the subjective experience of structural violence and the ways young parenting Latinas embody and respond to these experiences. We prioritize uprooted young parenting Latinas, whose material conditions and cultural worlds have placed them in tenuous positions, both socially constructed and experientially embodied. Existing programs and policies focused on these women fail to use relevant local knowledge and rarely involve them in messaging efforts. This paper offers a practical road map for rendering relevant and modifying notions of voice as a form of knowledge with the potential to disrupt authoritative knowledge. We present the context and method behind the four digital storytelling workshops that served as a venue for transforming assumptions about young parenting women and producing novel understandings of teen pregnancy and parenting. We end by suggesting an intervention for what we call “strategic authenticity” as it plays out in storytelling, meaning making, and voice, and implications for policy concerned with social justice and equity

The Ethics and Practice of Digital Storytelling as a Methodology for Community-Based Participatory Research in Public Health

Moderator: Alice Fiddian-Green, PhD student, Department of Health Promotion and Practice, School of Public Health and Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Presenters and Session Titles: “An Ethics Framework for Digital Storytelling as a Multi-Purposed Public Health Method”: Aline Gubrium, PhD Applying the Ethics Framework in Two Projects: (1) Louis Graham, MPH, DrPH, and Sarah Lowe, MPW: “Stakeholder Engagement and Ethical Planning for Digital Storytelling: The MOCHA Moving Forward Project” (2) Mary Paterno, CNM, PhD: “Digital Storytelling as Health Promotion and Data: Ethical Considerations from a Peer-Mentor Based Project to Address Perinatal Substance Use Disorder in a Rural Community Session Description Public health often mislocates its lineage in the medical sciences. Being foremost about people and what happens when people live together, the field is equally rooted in the humanistic and social sciences. By providing a focus that is more open to the rich and variegated tapestry of health and wellbeing, participatory visual and digital approaches, such as digital storytelling, enhance understandings of health and well being. If carried out responsibly, digital storytelling has the potential to function both as a vehicle for community-based health promotion, and as a method for collecting culture-centered data that can assist researchers and practitioners in better serving local communities. Based on a Freirian model, which promotes active engagement as participants construct stories to promote change through a group process, the goal of our digital storytelling practice is to provide a creative forum for expressing the generative themes or collective issues of community members. Beyond being mere data points, digital stories enliven statistics, make research meaningful, and position research participants as experts in their own right by inviting them to define relevant issues, broaden the evidence base, and create an emotional product that attracts and influences policymakers and the public at large. Finally, digital stories can be re-purposed for use in health communication campaigns (on and offline) to effect broad reach. Published literature on the ethics of community-based participatory research methods grounded in personal storytelling and participatory media approaches is in short supply, as are advanced training opportunities for public health researchers interested in these approaches (Gubrium & Harper, 2013; Gubrium, Hill, and Flicker, 2014; Gubrium, Hill & Fiddian-Green, 2016). Based on their previous research and practice experiences with digital storytelling, Gubrium and colleagues (2014) discuss the “situated practice of ethics” for participatory visual and digital methods in public health research and practice. Specifically, they write about six common challenges faced by researchers, advocates, and health promotion practitioners alike: the fuzzy boundaries that arise when negotiating between research, advocacy/action, and health promotion practice when using these methods; tensions related to recruitment of participants and consent to participate; the complex considerations specific to the release of the digital materials produced in workshops; power issues as they relate to the shaping of both stories and digital media content; the potential for reproducing harm in visual/digital representation; and the promise of confidentiality/anonymity to research participants. The proposed breakout session will provide a brief overview of the digital storytelling process (including discussion of recruitment, informed consent and release of materials, standard activities in the digital storytelling process, follow-up semi-structured interviews with participants, pre/post measures used to evaluate the impact of the process on participants, data analysis, and strategic communications based on produced digital stories). The session will enable participants to understand the myriad ethical issues that can present when carrying out community-based participatory research that employs digital storytelling as a methodology. By the end of the session, participants will be able to demonstrate critically enhanced awareness of ethical issues surrounding participatory visual and digital methodologies and identify effective ways to address these issues

Making statistics lie: Interrogating teenaged motherhood in a rural African-American community

The focus of this paper is to analyze the ways that three African-American women from one rural community in the southern U.S. interrogate social languages constructed around teenage pregnancy, which are influential in the construction of public health policies targeting young women said to be “at risk” for this social problem. While the research literature acknowledges that young Black women may be aware of these social languages, my research question asks if and how they construct their identities accordingly. This paper first looks at the ways that teenage motherhood is constructed as a social problem in the research literature—according to particular “social languages.” I then look at the way that three women position themselves within their community according to various social languages on teen motherhood. In particular, through narrative analysis I look at how the participants refer to these social languages to position themselves as certain kinds of women in their community

“I Don’t Ask God to Move the Mountain, Just Give Me the Strength to Climb It”: Disability Stories of Southern Rural African American Women

In this article, I focus on the life stories of African-American women living in a rural community in the South, particularly on their career trajectory stories. Life in this small community leaves little to offer in terms of work, with most women working either in a clothing factory in town, in the state prison located on the outskirts of town, or working in nearby University Town as nursing assistants or custodial workers—all jobs which rely on the participants’ strenuous labor and which often result in disabilities (often related to back or hip injuries) and the participants’ consequent inability to work outside the home. This article discusses the stories that participants tell about their disabilities and links the notion of a disabled body to various conceptions of womanhood, responsibility, and spirituality

Teaching and Speaking to Social Change: A Digital Storytelling Approach Addressing Access to Higher Education

In this article, we briefly review neoliberal economic rationales used to inform educational reforms, juxtaposed with the function of public education as a public good. We then introduce a new participatory visual method grounded in a human rights education approach, digital storytelling. Digital storytelling can serve triple purposes: as a data collection technique used by social researchers to critically assess participants’ experiences as they are affected by education reforms, as a collaborative method for political organizing, and as a tactic for building awareness to address these reforms. We review a digital storytelling workshop as it was carried out with graduate employees at a public university located in the Northeastern U.S. and conclude by offering implications for social research and human rights and social justice activism

Women-Reported Barriers and Facilitators of Adherence to Medications for Opioid Use Disorder

AIM: A poorly understood challenge is why many women with opioid use disorder do not remain engaged with medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD; e.g., methadone, buprenorphine, naltrexone) long enough to achieve sustained benefits. We aimed to identify barriers and facilitators that impact women\u27s MOUD adherence. METHODS: We conducted in-person interviews and focus groups with 20 women who had received MOUD for at least 90 days in Springfield and Holyoke, Massachusetts in 2018. Using grounded theory, we inductively identified major themes and selected illustrative quotations. FINDINGS: Gender-specific barriers to treatment are shaped by MOUD-related stigma stemming from multiple sources: (1) the internalization of messaging from social networks that equate pharmacotherapies to substituting one drug for another; (2) pharmacotherapy side effects related to weight gain, tooth decay, and interactions with anti-anxiety medications; (3) negative consequences from being discovered as a MOUD client, including loss of custody, children being bullied in school, workplace-related stigma, and being associated with sex-work. Women identified the following key facilitators of MOUD adherence: avoiding pain, sickness, and death; feeling safe in treatment settings, particularly for those with histories of interpersonal and sexual trauma; developing positive routines that replace opioid seeking behaviors and build self-esteem; maintaining healthy boundaries with friends, family, and partners who actively use opioids; and offering relatable peer support to other women as a source of recovery hope. CONCLUSION: Women encounter gendered stigma and support from individual, interpersonal, and community level sources that if addressed collectively, can inform improvements to MOUD engagement and adherence efforts