Bridging Theory to Practice: Utilizing the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) to Address Gaps in Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) Processes

The purpose of this study is to provide recommendations to bridging the theoretical with the practical in developing community-based participatory research (CBPR) health communication projects. As illustrated through a review of several case studies from health campaigns using CBPR, often times the theoretical orientations of CBPR become secondary to its praxis, with unspoken motives and agendas become motivating factors in guiding the initiatives. These motives may come in the form of funding organization priorities, funded grant proposal constraints, and the desire to continue relationships that are fostered in the development of CBPR projects. In response, this essay reintroduces the culture-centered approach (CCA) as an additional metatheoretical lens that can be utilized in linking theory to practice. The use of specific reflexive exercises are recommended to draw out unseen power differentials within project partnerships, calling into question the fundamental objectives guiding the decision-making processes within CBPR projects. This essay aspires to compel and strengthen CBPR health communication in practice to become more authentic to the orientation’s original conceptualization

Human Rights and the War on Terror: Complete 2005 - 2007 Topical Research Digest

“9/11 changed everything.” Not really. In fact, there has been far more continuity than change over the past six years in both international and domestic politics. Nonetheless, human rights often have been harmed—although not by terrorism but by “the war on terror.

Maria Cosway’s Hours: Cosmopolitan and Classical Visual Culture in Thomas Macklin’s Poets Gallery

Thomas Macklin’s Gallery of Poets opened at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street in 1788 with the aim to ‘display British Genius’ through ‘Prints Illustrative of the Most Celebrated British Poets’. Early newspaper coverage promised ‘a monument of the powers of the pencil in England, as the Vatican is at Rome’. The incongruous juxtaposition between Fleet Street and the Vatican spells out the cosmopolitan ambition of the literary gallery phenomenon through its real and imagined geographies of display. Through the format of the paper gallery of prints, Macklin’s Poets offered the inventions of British Poets as a repository of painting. This chapter examines how the cosmopolitan idiom of the paper gallery is negotiated in the first number of Macklin’s Poets. This essay examines the extent to which this ambition was achieved in the first Number of Macklin’s Poets which carried an engraving of Maria Cosway’s The Hours, originally a painting with an impressively European iconographic heritage. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783, and was retroactively associated by Macklin with Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Spring’. The trope of the Hours brought with it a weighty provenance derived from classical marble bas-relief, through the antiquarian pages of Pietro Santi Bartoli and Bernard de Montfaucon to Flaxman’s designs for Wedgwood plaques and vases. Cosway’s name also imported into Gray’s poem her reputation as a cosmopolitan, cultured woman who had completed the Grand Tour and who moved in elite circles including those of the Prince of Wales in London and the Duke of Orleans, Pierre d’Hancarville and Thomas Jefferson in Paris. The iconographies of the painting, the print, and the poem articulate a European cosmopolitan tradition for British Art

Mapping the cultural and social landscape of uterine leiomyomas: Fibroid tumors as a Black woman\u27s disease

In this dissertation, I explore a particular health issue called uterine fibroids (uterine leiomyomas), as it has been found to be the most common pelvic tumor occurring in all women in the US. The purpose of the dissertation is to explore how the social and cultural meaning of fibroid tumors are constructed in the narratives of African American women living with it within the localized context of Cook County, IL. Though proven to be prevalent in a large portion of women in the US, uterine fibroids have been found to be most prevalent in African American women and have been reported to be higher than 80%. Moreover, several epidemiological studies have shown that African American women are more likely than Caucasian women to have multiple fibroids, that are larger in diameter, with greater uterine weights, and more severe symptoms. Given this health issues physical, financial, and emotional burden in African American women\u27s lives, my dissertation employs the theoretical framing of the culture-centered approach (CCA). CCA places emphasis on the need for investigating alternative entry points to interpreting health and the ways in which ideas of health are delivered, particularly within marginalized populations. Thus, the dissertation\u27s primary goal is to allow African American women who have or have had the disease to provide alternative understandings of the health issue through their lived experience, thus leading towards change in the research agendas and funding of studies on women\u27s reproductive health and pointing towards structural modifications as articulated by underserved populations

A Culture-Centered Community-Grounded Approach to Disseminating Health Information among African Americans

10.1080/10410236.2018.1455626Health Communication34101075-108

Narratives of Stress in Health Meanings of African Americans in Lake County, Indiana

10.1080/10410236.2016.1204583Health Communication32101241-125