Project: Watsonville Youth

Project: Digital Media and Community Engagement

Project: Personal Visibility and Access to Health Care in the Time of COVID19: the Israeli Arab People of Jisr az-Zarqa

Project: Centering Youth Voices to Promote Environmental Justice and Community Health

Immersive Virtual Reality games are powerful mediums to help stimulate task-based rehabilitation towards more accessible, affordable, and accurate experiences. Subsequently, emotion and self-perception are crucial elements of mental health but are not often explored or monitored in the modern healthcare context. How could a virtual world be personalized if we understand how users feel as they undergo rehabilitation? To this end, this project aims at exploring multimodal stimulation and sensing to help motivate and adapt to the difficulty of therapeutic tasks based on each individual’s emotional state. Click here for more information on this project.

Published review article in Frontiers in Virtual Reality Nov. 12, 2020 Ultimate Display for Physical Rehabilitation: A Bridging Review on Immersive Virtual Reality

Women have always had intimate relationships with psychedelic plant medicines, though their perspectives on them have been largely marginalized. In this study, by inquiring into the experiences of women who participated in a year-long initiation program involving plant medicines, embodiment practices such as dance and yoga, and group therapeutic processes, I found that these women reported improved mental and spiritual health in which the embodiment work and the collective experience not only of group therapeutic work, but of being and working together over time, were important parts of their healing. Although there is a wide spectrum of ways to work with psychedelics and many of them are effective sources of healing, this study shows that combining use of psychedelic plant medicines with embodiment practices and group therapeutic processes in a homo-social, collective environment was an effective approach to mental and spiritual healing for women who participated in this program.

I am working with the Community Water Center (CWC), an environmental advocacy nonprofit, to help purchase water bottles for the students of a high school in the Pajaro Valley, California and generate educational materials around proper techniques for water bottle sanitation. The cancer-causing chemical chromium-6 was detected in the high school’s drinking water, raising alarms for the students, their families, school staff, and regional organizations, who are working in unison to find a long-term, clean water source. As a short-term intervention, CWC helped to ensure that the high school receive deliveries of water bottle jugs to replace the contaminated well water supply. This project contributes specifically to CWC’s efforts by conducting a literature review of studies on the most effective water bottle sanitation practices; providing the findings to CWC and to the high school’s community for reference; and supplying funds to purchase water bottles.

Behaviors that occur during romantic courtship have been implicated in various forms of intimate partner violence (IPV) against women, suggesting a fine line between romance and IPV. This focus group study explored the phenomenon of romanticized abuse to examine under which contexts various forms of psychological/emotional abuse and unhealthy relationship dynamics are more likely to be perceived as normal, desirable, and romantic by heterosexual women. Preliminary analyses suggest that when presented with hypothetical abusive scenarios that are romanticized, participants identified the situation as abusive and unhealthy while simultaneously finding it romantic or normal. Additionally, specific contextual factors shaped perceptions of abuse differently. For instance, a man who persistently pursued a female love interest was perceived more positively than a woman pursuing a male love interest. These findings will be used to inform prevention efforts around relationship abuse.

Rural communities in the Salinas Valley have struggled for decades to access clean water amidst extensive fertilizer runoff and nitrate contamination of groundwater supplies. While environmental justice activists fight for clean water access in rural residential areas, my study focuses on the ways that this environmental justice work intersects with struggles for economic mobility within the agricultural industry. Many of the communities affected by nitrate contamination of drinking water are comprised of agricultural workers who have begun to develop farming enterprises of their own. This year, I have begun conducting ethnographic research to explore how struggles for clean drinking water might be understood through resident first-generation farmers’ on-farm practices. Findings provoke questions about what it means to live in a polluted world and what types of interventions can or should be recognized for their contributions to environmental justice.

Taking less medication than prescribed by one’s doctor, or medication rationing, can serve as a “canary in a coal mine”, signaling the poor condition of health systems. Building on 3 years of ethnographic work along the Dominican-Haitian border, GCH funding allowed me to conduct surveys with US-based primary care medical mission Waves of Health and local partners. Quantitative results showed that patients who ranked below average on a household amenities index were more likely to report medication rationing than those who ranked above average, indicating that patients ration because they are unable to purchase the proper dosage of their medications. Further survey work, informal interviews and participant observation showed that patients not only rationed because they could not afford their medications, but also because they shared medication with community members, what Huber & Stephens (2012) call an indicator of strong kinship ties. Click here for more information on this project.

This project was inspired by the lack of narrative-informed research on homeless women’s health. We aimed to better understand the way in which this marginalized population interacts with our health systems and what barriers existed that prevented the utilization, and effectiveness of care. Through the analysis of semi-structured interviews with several homeless women, we were able to categorize findings into four distinct, overarching themes: 1) interaction with healthcare systems, 2) interaction with healthcare personnel, 3) navigation of healthcare and food systems, and 4) resilience. We compounded these themes into a framework we coined burden of navigation. We define the burden of navigation as the systemic, structural, and individual challenges in accessing and utilizing a wide variety of healthcare services. Our findings made clear that there isn’t necessarily a lack of healthcare services for homeless women, but rather a lack of ability in navigating those services.

Consisting of 14 Latinx youth from farmworker families of a cohort named “Growing Justice” with support Global and Community Health Wellbeing Fellowship and the Community Agroecology Network (CAN), Growing Justice will create an audio map of Pajaro Valley’s (PV) cultural “foodshed,” to generate a community-based, culturally relevant and health food-sharing network among farmworker families, urban youth, small-scale farmers and culinary professionals. The preparation for the work has been happening weekly at a community garden where the youth have engaged as the caretakers. Since shelter-at-home orders were given, workshop activities have shifted online. Work will continue into the summer as the season cycle progresses. We still visit the garden to plant and grow, except that the caretaking is decentralized. Global community dialogues with coffee growers from Mexico and Nicaragua were planned in-person but now will happen online as well. Click here for more information on this project.

This project was inspired by the lack of narrative-informed research on homeless women’s health. We aimed to better understand the way in which this marginalized population interacts with our health systems and what barriers existed that prevented the utilization, and effectiveness of care. Through the analysis of semi-structured interviews with several homeless women, we were able to categorize findings into four distinct, overarching themes: 1) interaction with healthcare systems, 2) interaction with healthcare personnel, 3) navigation of healthcare and food systems, and 4) resilience. We compounded these themes into a framework we coined burden of navigation. We define the burden of navigation as the systemic, structural, and individual challenges in accessing and utilizing a wide variety of healthcare services. Our findings made clear that there isn’t necessarily a lack of healthcare services for homeless women, but rather a lack of ability in navigating those services.