Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the United States (21 million according to U.S. Census, 2016). Despite this, Asian America’s diverse experiences remain invisible as a result of the “model minority” myth, the perception that they are stress and problem-free. This project employs the concept of intersectionality with literary and artistic interpretations of the Asian American experience to the field of psychology to ask: How can the humanities and social sciences make visible Asian America’s unique and diverse risks and resilience in mental health?
There is, at present, significant enthusiasm across the political spectrum for long acting reversible contraceptives (LARC), which promise an affordable, reliable, and safe means by which to reduce rates of unplanned pregnancy and abortion. As LARC promotion efforts are officially adopted by states and the world’s most influential health organizations, sustained critical attention is warranted to the diversity of ways in which LARC may or may not do the work it is intended to do in the world: to empower people to choose not to get pregnant.
The lived experience of African American men and the prominence of the Black Barbershop in African American culture, together offer a unique and compelling backdrop for examining discourses of health in Black communities. This proposed project illuminates the space of the barbershop into an intersectional dynamic of men and health; and the innovative approach of Black barbers as community health advocates and health navigators.
Philosophers have long argued over the relationship between health and human well-being. While some claim that health - understood as the proper functioning of one's body - is inessential to well-being, our project considers the relationship between well-being and "integrative health," which compasses a spectrum of social factors, including values and meaningfulness.
My book project, Immovable Bodies: Women Writing Health and Disease in the British Romantic Era, posits that British women writers during the Romantic period (1780-1832) resist the universalizing, transdisciplinary claims of both medicine and poetics of this same period by producing literary texts that ruminate upon immobility: a refusal to be moved exhibited by certain bodies, objects, and mediums.
The World Health Organization (WHO) clearly defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being rather than as the absence of sickness or frailty (WHO 1948). Despite this concrete and universally accepted definition of health, different social groups may vary in their perceptions and definitions of health based on individuals’ and groups’ histories and social positions within society. Thus, we ask whether, how, for whom, and under what conditions individuals define health.