Rebecca Garden is leading a course for public health, education/disability studies, and medical students that immerses them in interviewing skills and practices, disability studies and deaf studies, humanities methods of data collection and analysis (such as comics/zine making, podcast and video making). The project partners with a food systems alliance in the region, and the students are conducting interviews about the experiences of those most at risk for food insecurity. So far the team has interviewed Deaf refugees on a small urban farm where they are growing food. The students learned about the barriers Deaf refugees faced to food access due to COVID-19. They also understood the outreach strategies that addressed the barriers, led by two leaders in their community partnered with a local NGO and community advocate. The students will also interview people in public housing near the Health Science school campus. The students will use humanities methods as well as public health data in their analyses of the interviews. Their projects are intended to model humanities-driven public health messaging (such as found in Carrie Mae Weems' Take 6 public art).
My perspective on public health educators and practitioners is that they often lack the kind of grounding in history and social theory that can illuminate structural and systemic inequalities as well as lacking the discourse for framing public health messages that will resonate with the public.
Explore the Humanities pathways that led to this project
Syracuse, New York, USA