Representation, Re-Presentation + Resistance
Participatory Geographies of Place, Health, and Embodiment
Book published by Springer Nature (2022)
Overview (Backcover)
This book draws on the author's ten years of participatory work to examine core themes of (mis)representation, re-presentation, and resistance within place-health research and practice. The book includes practice- and research-based projects with implications and applications for practitioners (e.g. local health department epidemiologists) and academics, introducing readers to an array of new and mixed-methods within place-health research. It also introduces new conceptual and analytical place-health frameworks that more explicitly account for power—both within place making, unmaking, and remaking processes, and within the (re)production of place-health knowledges.
Across six chapters, the author reports and reflects on a selection of research projects, raising key considerations in regard to place-health (mis)representation, and highlighting the value of participatory methods and processes in re-presenting—and decolonizing—spatial narratives of health. This includes an emphasis on the integration of community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles with the technological and procedural affordances of information and communication technologies (ICTs). With each chapter drawing from CBPR, decolonizing, social epidemiology, health geography, Black feminist, and critical theory orientations, the book offers an integrated call and framing for a critical examination of how geographies of “place” and health—and narratives/stories therein—are constructed, and perhaps might be de/re-constructed through inclusive and equitable research practices that center community and offer a mode of resistance for the production of place-health counternarratives.
The book is intended for academic researchers and practitioners in public health and health geography fields, particularly those whose work engages social epidemiology, urban planning, and aspects of community development, and will also appeal to researchers and practitioners who use participatory, community-inclusive methods and processes in their work, especially as related to community mapping.
“There are material and symbolic consequences of a place-health research that inserts itself into places for purposes of data extraction and commodification—profiting off “samples” (e.g. survey data, biological specimens) and (re)producing disembodied, decontextualized narratives of place. In other words, a decolonizing orientation offers a much-needed mode of resistance, rearticulation, and resurgence to counter the White supremacist, settler-colonial logics and methods that characterize the standard place-health research “ritual”. ”
“Existing work at these intersections, especially within public health, has tended to favor highly quantitative and “outsider”-driven approaches to understanding place-health contexts and relationships—e.g. non-participatory survey-based research conducted by outside researchers without collaboration or meaningful engagement with/within the communities they’re researching. Community residents—and/as research participants—are viewed and valued primarily as data points, not as political constituents with agency and networked social power that could help explain or intervene on the data and its determinants.
In this way, procedural and methodological norms under traditional approaches preclude expressions of/actively mask residents’/participants’ agency, discounting/devaluing their knowledge/expertise while simultaneously dispossessing them of their stories/experiences (“data”). In this regard, relationships between researchers and residents represent not only the re-inscription of social hierarchy, but the reification of place-health research as (re)colonization.
A consequence and analytic concern is the production of spatial narratives that not only misspecify place-health effects, but mischaracterize/misrepresent important community spaces, affording only partial and decontextualized—ahistoric, apolitical, disembodied—renditions of place-health geographies. Accordingly, a core and animating question for this book is, ‘how can we reimagine a more dynamic, epistemically just, and actionable place-health research—one which can counter/enhance existing place-health (mis)representations, serve as a process for re-presentation, and act as a site/mode of critical resistance?’”
Chapter 1
“traditional place-health knowledge production practices—in masking resident voice/agency, stripping away context, and foreclosing possibility of counternarrative—function to center and serve “outsider” narratives of place in a mold that settler-colonial, White logics can accommodate as legitimate”
“It seems rather clear: place and health—and knowledge production thereabout—are invariably (re)productions, and sites of, political contestation. From this position, in the context of place-health research and health geographies—and representations and narratives produced thereof—we should be asking ourselves a couple of simple questions: what are the rules regarding place-health knowledge production, and who gets to (re)set them?”
Chapter 6
“It should concern us all that this work has been referred to as the “new frontier” of public health, as I cannot think of a more fundamentally errant and symbolically violent frame through which to reify place-health work as (re)colonization, dispossession, and erasure. The intention here has been to explicitly name this and call us in, so that we can re-up and reimagine what it means to “represent” place in our work, and be reminded what’s at stake in our rituals of “place” misrepresentation.”
“Place-health researchers would do well to recalibrate our methodological and procedural norms towards more inclusive approaches to place-health knowledge production that afford space for place-health counternarratives to refine place knowledge(s) and/or resist forces of symbolic and epistemic erasure. In doing so, we can pursue a more thorough engagement with notions of power in placemaking, and perhaps, move the field away from logics and methods of dispossession and misrepresentation, and closer to praxes and practices of decolonization and resistance.”
Chapter 6