Project: “Youth Mentors: Mentoring Latino Youth during the COVID-19 Pandemic”

The current research discusses how children are made vulnerable due to environmental risk factors. Mentoring can help develop many aspects of children participating in afterschool programs and extracurricular activities. Social and emotional development is crucial for youth experiencing hardship to become resilient to risky behavior (Herrera et al., 2007). In formulating the research questions, I attended various community events in person and virtual to understand diverse local subcultures. Youth mentoring programs require people with experience working in the field, understanding adolescent behaviors and actions while adjusting to develop an individualized style working with children and adolescents. In particular, this project aims to record and listen to these youth mentors’ experiences and how they adjust to the shelter-in-place orders, State and official standardized measures for COVID-19, and how it compares to pre-pandemic day-to-day operations.

Project: “Working Conditions of Incarcerated Firefighters in 2020”

I worked with an organization called the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), which provides trainings and job placements for formerly incarcerated individuals to pursue careers as firefighters. Through my collaboration with FFRP, I was able to interview 12 program participants and ask them about what their work conditions were like during the 2020 fire season, particularly in terms of COVID-19 and the CDCR’s policies around COVID. During January and February, I worked with FFRP staff members to compile environmental research on wildfires and firefighting to complement their workforce data for grants. This material was finalized to apply for the Keeling Curve Award, and it was announced in April that FFRP was one of ten finalist organizations amongst more than 200 that had applied. In March I began interviewing participants to ask them about their experiences during 2020 and I asked individuals to compare the 2020 season with years past. The most surprising finding was that most people interviewed regarded the historic 2020 fire season not as particularly unique but certainly more busy than other years. The themes that most characterized the work conditions of incarcerated firefighters during the 2020 fire season were being understaffed and overworked due to the CDCR’s COVID restrictions on transfers and housing density. 

Project: “Using Digital Media to Share Incarcerated Stories”

Through the Everett Program at UC Santa Cruz, and subsequently the Gateways Project; a project group within the program, we have been able to use digital media to amplify the voices of the incarcerated population. During the pandemic, prisons and jails throughout California have been on full lockdown. While many of us had to stay inside during shelter in place, incarcerated people were unable to leave their cells for up to 24 hours a day, with no classes, programming, visits, phone calls, or even interaction with other incarcerated people. One way that the Gateways project will use their resources to bring attention to incarcerated stories is by helping Adamu Chan, a formerly incarcerated filmmaker, with a 30-minute documentary called “What These Walls Won’t Hold,” to create video evidence of the reality of being inside San Quentin State Prison during Covid-19. “What These Walls Won’t Hold,” seeks to tell this story and share the health inequity that exists within California Prisons with the outside world. In addition to the thousands of people that became ill and the 28 who died from COVID-19 inside of California prisons, there are untold mental and physical impacts that the pandemic has had on incarcerated peoples health. By educating the public about this, there can be a change in understanding of how the incarcerated are treated and hopefully spark a desire to advocate for this population.  

Project: “Visibility and Access to Health Care in the Time of COVID19: The Israeli Arab People of Jisr al-Zarqa”

The Israeli Arab and Palestinian people of Jisr al-Zarqa live on the periphery of Israel-Palestine’s national communities. Borne from families of origins in the Jordan Valley, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, the community of Jisr underwent COVID19 as an underserved minority within the state of Israel. Public and community support systems during the time of Corona were two integral pillars of overall health and wellbeing that I monitored the three month exit-period of the final Corona lockdown to vaccination dispersal. The concept of visibility stands for the socially-stratified ability to, and impact of being seen.  By learning about Jisr from local leaders and youth, and participating in familial and community events, I begin to understand how and what the locals responded to, and how these actions were supported by local and national authorities. Collectively, the  response to COVID-19 acts like a stress test for the community’s ongoing wellbeing in the context of the modern state of Israel. How the community of Jisr al-Zarqa delt with COVID19 is a story about local context and resilience through the lens of medical anthropology.

Project: Perceptions of SARS-CoV-2 Risk Among Undomiciled Individuals: Public Health Implications

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

The town of Gonzales, in Monterey County, is a predominantly Latinx community in a rural, primarily agricultural, region that suffers from a variety of environmental injustices. To learn from and with the next generation of educators and activists, my study engages and brings together Gonzales youth with UCSC faculty, students and staff. The project seeks to enrich and expand youth leadership efforts through a stronger partnership with UCSC. This year, I helped facilitate three education exchanges that interfaced youth from the Salinas Valley with UCSC undergraduates. The initial reflections provoke questions about how environmental identities are formed, what it means to live in agricultural landscapes, how are notions of environmental racism embodied, and what kind of learning spaces can be created to promote environmental justice. An Environmental Justice Youth Leadership Academy (EJYLA) is planned for summer 2021 to embrace these inquiries. The project will utilize student-and youth-centered participatory methodologies and approaches to explore how UCSC undergraduates and youth from nearby environmental justice communities understand, experience, and resist environmental and systemic racism in regards to environmental health and well-being. Curricula has been created for the EJYLA to enrich environmental justice education at UCSC and beyond.

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.