How does unequal access to health
care affect the lives and experiences of people from different
communities across Baltimore and the nation? UMBC’s Public Humanities
and Health Justice Research Forum addressed this question through remarks and conversations with researchers from UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS), College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT), and College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS), as well as Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University, Coppin State University, and Columbia University.
The forum was the fourth in a series organized by UMBC’s Office of the Vice President for Research
to bring together faculty tackling shared topics from widely diverse
angles. “We established the research forum series in 2014 to provide an
opportunity for scientists and scholars to collaboratively explore
multiple facets of a topic central to the research and scholarship of
UMBC,” says Karl Steiner,
vice president for research. Previous forum focus areas include
high-performance computing, climate change and the environment, and the
visualization of science.
UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities
sponsored and helped organize the latest forum, focused on how the
humanities can help address challenges related to health care access.
Dresher Center Director Jessica Berman
shared, “It was exciting to see how much humanistic scholarship is
taking place all across campus and the potential partnerships it
creates, between UMBC and other universities. This research forum helped
to highlight the humanities in their capacity not only to ask good
questions but also to help solve important problems such as health
justice and access.”
Racism in Health Care Policy
Keynote speaker Graham Mooney,
professor in the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins
University, presented his research on the Baltimore Medical Care Plan of
1948. “By using the history of medicine and public policy we can better
understand how the process of racism and segregation have interacted to
prevent black residents’ access to quality medical care in Baltimore,”
explained Mooney.
The topic led to an interactive
conversation about the negative impact the 1948 plan had on the quality
of life of Baltimore’s black community and how it served as a model for
similar approaches in other states, and later for Medicare and Medicaid.
During the discussion, Shawn Bediako,
associate professor of psychology, argued that analyses of health care
access across U.S. history should also include how black communities
have responded to inequities. He mentioned, as examples, the
establishment of the National Negro Health Movement and Office of Negro
Health Work.
Listening to Communities
Valuing community voices was a key
theme in the two interdisciplinary panel discussions that followed.
These discussions revealed how key humanities methods, such as attending
to history, paying attention to narrative—including who gets to speak and when—and
thinking critically about how we understand and value specific human
experiences can be crucial to addressing issues important to
contemporary public life.
In the first of those panels, Kristen
Slesar, from the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University,
shared her experience using personal narratives to inform medical
research. Slesar is a licensed clinical social worker and
psychotherapist who focuses on child trauma. She regularly teaches about
health care justice and health care for underserved communities.
Scott Casper, dean of the College of arts, humanities, and social sciences (CAHSS), then
moderated a discussion on “Listening as Public Practice: Towards Equity
and Justice” that included Bediako as well as colleagues Drew Holladay, assistant professor of English; Amy Hurst, associate professor of information systems; and Denise Meringolo,
associate professor of history. The panelists explored how centering
the narratives of individuals in their research improves the quality of
their findings and the potential impact of their work. “Confronting the
barriers to health equity compels us to look across disciplines and
toward collaborations among social scientists, scientists and engineers,
and humanists and artists,” noted Casper.
Lawrence Brown, assistant professor
of community health and policy at Morgan State University, spoke during
the second panel about the impacts of residential displacement and
financial disinvestment on community health. In addition to his work on
the impact of historical trauma on community health, he also leads the
student-driven #BmoreLEADfree project focused on ending lead poisoning
in Baltimore.
Berman then led a group discussion on the topic “Communication, the Urban Environment, and Health Justice,” with Dena Aufseeser,
assistant professor of geography and environmental systems; Katherine
Bankole-Medina, professor of history at Coppin State University; Dawn Biehler, associate professor of geography and environmental systems; and Jennifer Maher,
associate professor of English. The discussion showed how paying
attention to the ways local communities understand issues of health and
the environment can challenge the kinds of changes we propose and the
ways we communicate about them.
New Health Equity Collaborative
The forum also introduced UMBC’s new
Collaborative for the Interdisciplinary Promotion of Health Equity
Research (CIPHER). The collaborative will form working groups bringing
together UMBC researchers across different fields to examine current
challenges to health care equity, and to inform innovative solutions for
the future.
Bediako, whose research focuses on
health care inequities experienced by patients with sickle cell disease,
will serve as the founding convener of this initiative. He shares, “I
am most excited that CIPHER will aim to reach across disciplinary
boundaries and use multiple perspectives to address specific challenges
to health equity.”
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