Pedagogy.
#DecolonizePublicHealth
I think it is especially important to acknowledge the historic and current context of public health training and research—wherein the communities most burdened by social and health inequities are also the ones least represented among faculty, researchers, practitioners, and students. It is in this context that I deliberately center principles of equity, epistemic justice, and decolonizing knowledges within my approach to teaching, drawing heavily from Critical Pedagogy, Critical Theory, Decolonial Theory, and Black Feminist Theory.
A fundamental aim of my teaching is to build students’ confidence in their own knowledge and expertise rooted in their lived experiences within the social production of health, but to do so with the understanding that such knowledge and expertise will always be partial, relative, and situated—that is, that they should own and value their knowledge, while acknowledging that it is not the only knowledge and not discounting that of others. Similar to how I engage Freirean praxis within my chosen research methodologies, I try to create a learning space conducive to reflexivity and “conscientization”—wherein students jointly recognize and unveil the myriad and often overlapping (within and between students) forms of oppression and exclusion linked to health inequities.
For me, as a social epidemiologist trained in the empirical and all manner of stratification, I try to frame a discourse/learning space that acknowledges perhaps the most fundamental element of knowledge and science: that it is socially produced. What constitutes fact, evidence, or truth is inextricably linked to whom, and within what context, is doing the appraising. So for me, promoting a deep curiosity, reflexivity, and an attitude of co-learning is integral, such that students grow to sense that their knowledge is not necessarily imperfect, but perhaps incomplete—meaning that their liberation (e.g. educationally, socially) is inextricably linked to the liberation of those sitting next to them.
Courses.
Gender, Race, Class + Health (Undergraduate)
Course Description (RP): Focuses on developing students’ understanding of the social production of health and health inequities—that is, the ways through which social, economic, and political forces intersect to produce unequal (and unfair) societal distributions of power, resources, and opportunity, with consequent impacts on individual and population health. In doing so, this course develops student knowledge of core social determinants of health (SDH), with particular focus on: income inequality, poverty, and classism; race/ethnicity and racism; sex, gender, gender identity, and sexism; heterosexism; geographic place and place-based inequalities; social inequality across the lifecourse; and intersectionality. Students critically engage and evaluate multiple public health practice/research theories and frameworks, including socioecological, ecosocial, fundamental causes, and health equity models. Coursework and training activities include introductory coverage of advanced topics in biology (e.g. stress processes, allostasis and allostatic load, epigenetics), such that students are able to identify physiological processes through which outside social experiences/exposures rooted in social inequality “get under our skin” to affect the health of individuals, communities, and populations. Learning objectives are engaged through a combination of reading, lecture, quizzes, group projects, in-class group activities, student-led lectures and presentations, film analyses, news media analyses, and music listening sessions.
Community Organizing for Health (Graduate)
Course Description (generic via Course Catalog): Emphasizes the role of community organizing to engage diverse communities to advance the conditions in which people can be healthy. It further examines the role of health educators, grassroots activists, and others in stimulating social, political, and economic approaches to promote community health. Also addresses the advancement of theoretical knowledge and practical skills of community organizing.
Public Health Law, Policy + Ethics (Undergraduate)
Course Description (RP): Introduces students to key legal and ethical concepts and principles that: a) form the foundation of public health law in the US, and b) inform, enable, and constrain public health policies, regulations, and processes related to research (e.g. with human subjects) and practice (e.g. disease surveillance). This course explores the legal/ethical basis and implications of/for a range of public health issues, from vaccination mandates and quarantine, to compulsory licensing and social determinants of health (SDH). In doing so, this course draws on key legal cases and scholarly writings to introduce students to core underlying legal and ethical concepts and frameworks that underlie modern public health law and ethics, including, for example: procedural and substantive due process, paternalism, autonomy, nondelegation, preemption, public health police powers, levels of scrutiny, negligence, precautionary principle, and strict liability. Core topics include constitutional law, administrative law, tort litigation in public health, ethics in public health research and practice, epidemic and pandemic disease response measures, pharmaceutical regulation, privacy protection, and public health law and ethics in the context of human rights, economic inequality/exploitation, and SDH. Learning objectives are engaged through a combination of reading, lecture, quizzes, group projects, in-class group activities, student-led lectures and presentations, movie analyses, and news media analyses.
Decolonizing Public Health Research: Epidemiology, Epistemology + Embodiment (Graduate)
Course Description (RP): This seminar course focuses on developing students’ understanding of the social production of science as specifically related to epidemiological research on population health and health inequities. In this spirit, this course provides a cursory introduction to core theories and conceptual frameworks related to knowledge, power, and power-knowledge relations, and the manner in which these relations inform/animate public health research. It critically interrogates dominant epistemologies and paradigms of research practice within the field (e.g. positivism, reductionism, essentialism). In this capacity, this course explores the prospect that public health research, and epidemiology specifically, functions as a technology of biopower reliant upon the (re)colonization of historically and presently oppressed and socially/politically excluded populations—a (re)colonization tacitly endorsed by modern public health knowledge and “health equity” frames that subjugate “other(ed)” bodies/knowledges as disembodied health artifacts (i.e. data) to be “discovered” for commodification within financial (and social) capital knowledge markets.
This course draws upon and integrates critical theory and concepts related to ecosocial theory and embodiment, decolonial theory and settler colonialism, critical race theory, Black feminist theory, biopower and biopolitics, participatory research, data justice, and decolonizing methods. As feasible given quarterly enrollment, students work in interprofessional teams to explore these various course themes, integrating their respective knowledges, lens, and experiences to critically examine epistemological values and discursive properties of (epidemiological) public health research.