scholarly journals Immigrant Health Inequities: Exposing Diversions and White Supremacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 341
Author(s):  
San Juanita García ◽  
Taylor Trummel ◽  
Monica Cornejo ◽  
Katherine Maldonado ◽  
Ana Ojeda ◽  
...  

Diversions occur when research disregards the inequality-generating actions of advantaged groups and instead focuses attention on the actions and behaviors of disadvantaged groups. We incorporate important insights from COVID-19 to illustrate historical and contemporary examples of diversions. This paper highlights US immigrant health inequities—a burgeoning subfield within the broader health inequalities canon—to explore: (1) if and how diversions appear in immigrant health studies; (2) how often white supremacy and intersectionality are explicitly named in grants, publicly available datasets, and published research. The data derive from: NIH R01 grants (17), publicly available datasets that focus on immigrant health (7), and research published in three health journals (14). Using a qualitative content analysis approach, we analyzed these data as evidence concerning the knowledge production cycle, and investigate whether: (a) the role of advantaged groups in generating inequalities is explicitly mentioned; (b) disadvantaged groups are asked about discriminatory actions perpetuated by advantaged groups; (c) health inequalities are placed on the conditions of disadvantaged groups; (d) if white supremacy and intersectionality are explicitly mentioned in grants, publicly available datasets, and research articles. The findings demonstrate the prevalence of diversions in immigrant health research, given an overemphasis on health behaviors and cultural explanations towards explaining immigrant health inequities. There was no mention of white supremacy across the knowledge production cycle. Intersectionality was mentioned once in a research article. We argue that understanding white supremacy’s role in the knowledge production cycle illuminates how diversions occur and prevail. We provide suggestions on moving away from diversionary research, toward adopting an intersectional approach of the study of immigrant health inequities.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-203
Author(s):  
Aimee Louw

Poetry is a gentle but relentless coach, a lover, personal benchmark, and record for growth. She shifts beliefs, practices, and emotions, tracking pitfalls, steps back, steps around, stillness, like a smooth laketop or slow-streaming river. In this Research-Creation piece, I develop my version of ‘Crip Poetics’ through autoethnographic methods including video poems and hybrid prose-poetry writing. Drawing on Critical Disability Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Mobility Studies, I bring questions of white supremacy and settler colonialism into conversation with accessibility in Canada. I interview Indigenous people with varying relationships to disability and disabled people of multiple settler cultures, using qualitative methods including Hangout as Method (Warren Cariou) and Wheeling Interviews (Laurence Parent). Engaging with interview transcripts as text, to continue conversation and exchange with interviewees, this study offers reflections on interviewing as a method. Reflecting on the limits of participant-action research and representation, I interrogate the role of researchers in marginalized knowledge production, engaging with the limits and possibilities of ‘unsettling research’. I aim to redirect eugenic trends in disability discourse and history towards prioritizing the telling of our own stories. It's my hope that these conversations and the intersections of these struggles are brought to the fore—this selection being one avenue among many to further this work. Dance with me between words and beyond political affiliation.


Author(s):  
Julie Sin

This chapter looks at the role of a health services commissioning function (or equivalent planning function) in addressing health inequalities of access and outcomes of services. Working definitions of health inequalities and health inequities are described for use. The backdrop to health inequities in populations is also described for orientation. The chapter then considers the roles of commissioning in contributing to reducing such inequities of access and outcomes. Commissioners’ generic responsibilities, direct contributions, and collaborative roles are captured. It is further noted that taking such a whole-system approach and recognizing the value of ‘starting early’ is also very apt for commissioners, as achieving equity of service outcomes depends not only on equitable access to services, but also to some extent on reducing the differentials in early risk factors in a population, as the latter can impact later outcomes even with seemingly equitable access to treatment services.


Author(s):  
Brigit Toebes

This chapter discusses the role of law and human rights in socioeconomic health inequalities in Europe. Given that socioeconomic health inequalities are largely unnecessary and avoidable, it is widely claimed that they lead to health inequities (i.e., avoidable inequalities in health). Addressing health inequities is considered to be an ‘ethical imperative’ and a ‘matter of social justice’. Human rights standards provide a moral and legal framework for assessing matters of social justice, including socioeconomic health inequalities. This chapter analyses how the main European organizations (EU and Council of Europe) address health inequalities. Specific attention is paid to the role of human rights law as a tool that may give support and priority to improving health and reducing inequities. By way of explaining how social determinants are addressed at the domestic level, the chapter discusses (the approaches to) socioeconomic health inequalities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The chapter establishes that while not as dramatic as in the United States, socioeconomic health inequalities are a reality in Europe, and that inequalities have widened both between and within European countries. It concludes that reducing health inequalities should be a key priority in European and domestic health policy, and that human rights law plays an important role in informing what needs to be done.


Author(s):  
Katherine Smith ◽  
Jon Foster ◽  
Katherine Brown

This chapter examines the relationship between alcohol use and health inequalities. It first reviews the evidence and theories concerning health inequalities in morbidity and mortality as well as evidence and theories that specifically relate to the role of alcohol within these broader inequalities. The available evidence suggests that alcohol-related harms follow the expected social gradient; greater harms are suffered by more disadvantaged groups, at least for men and for younger women. However, some statistics indicate that people living in deprived communities consume less alcohol than more advantaged communities. The chapter analyses potential explanations for this apparent tension, often referred to as the alcohol harm paradox, along with evidence concerning the impact of alcohol-related interventions, such as minimum unit pricing (MUP), Reducing the Strength (RTS) schemes and welfare spending, on inequalities. It concludes with a range of relevant research and policy recommendations.


Author(s):  
Yusra Ribhi Shawar ◽  
Jennifer Prah Ruger

Careful investigations of the political determinants of health that include the role of power in health inequalities—systematic differences in health achievements among different population groups—are increasing but remain inadequate. Historically, much of the research examining health inequalities has been influenced by biomedical perspectives and focused, as such, on ‘downstream’ factors. More recently, there has been greater recognition of more ‘distal’ and ‘upstream’ drivers of health inequalities, including the impacts of power as expressed by actors, as well as embedded in societal structures, institutions, and processes. The goal of this chapter is to examine how power has been conceptualised and analysed to date in relation to health inequalities. After reviewing the state of health inequality scholarship and the emerging interest in studying power in global health, the chapter presents varied conceptualisations of power and how they are used in the literature to understand health inequalities. The chapter highlights the particular disciplinary influences in studying power across the social sciences, including anthropology, political science, and sociology, as well as cross-cutting perspectives such as critical theory and health capability. It concludes by highlighting strengths and limitations of the existing research in this area and discussing power conceptualisations and frameworks that so far have been underused in health inequalities research. This includes potential areas for future inquiry and approaches that may expand the study of as well as action on addressing health inequality.


Author(s):  
Torun Reite ◽  
Francis Badiang Oloko ◽  
Manuel Armando Guissemo

Inspired by recent epistemological and ontological debates aimed at unsettling and reshaping conceptions of language, this essay discusses how mainstream sociolinguistics offers notions meaningful for studying contexts of the South. Based on empirical studies of youth in two African cities, Yaoundé in Cameroon and Maputo in Mozambique, the essay engages with “fluid modernity” and “enregisterment” to unravel the role that fluid multilingual practices play in the social lives of urban youth. The empirically grounded theoretical discussion shows how recent epistemologies and ontologies offer inroads to more pluriversal knowledge production. The essay foregrounds: i) the role of language in the sociopolitical battles of control over resources, and ii) speakers’ reflexivity and metapragmatic awareness of register formations of fluid multilingual practices. Moreover, it shows how bundles of localized meanings construct belongings and counterhegemonic discourses, as well as demonstrating speakers’ differential valuations and perceptions of boundaries and transgressions across social space.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Saskia Hanft-Robert ◽  
Nadine Janis Pohontsch ◽  
Cornelia Uhr ◽  
Alexander Redlich ◽  
Franka Metzner

<b><i>Background:</i></b> The therapeutic alliance is considered to be one of the most important factors of psychotherapy and is a necessary requirement for a successful treatment in interpreter-mediated psychotherapy. <b><i>Patients and Methods:</i></b> Using interpreter-mediated guided interviews, 10 refugee patients who experienced interpreter-mediated psychotherapy were asked about factors influencing the development of a trusting therapeutic alliance in the triad. The analysis of the interviews followed the rules of content-structuring qualitative content analysis. <b><i>Results:</i></b> A total of 11 factors were identified which could be assigned to the interpreter, therapist, or patient. In the analysis, the central role of the interpreter in establishing a therapeutic alliance in the triad became particularly clear. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> Consideration of the factors that, from the patients’ perspective, influence the establishment and maintenance of a trusting alliance within the triad, as well as the recommendations for action derived from this for psychotherapists and interpreters can lead to an improvement in the therapeutic treatment of refugees.


Author(s):  
Ruth Stock-Homburg

AbstractKnowledge production within the interdisciplinary field of human–robot interaction (HRI) with social robots has accelerated, despite the continued fragmentation of the research domain. Together, these features make it hard to remain at the forefront of research or assess the collective evidence pertaining to specific areas, such as the role of emotions in HRI. This systematic review of state-of-the-art research into humans’ recognition and responses to artificial emotions of social robots during HRI encompasses the years 2000–2020. In accordance with a stimulus–organism–response framework, the review advances robotic psychology by revealing current knowledge about (1) the generation of artificial robotic emotions (stimulus), (2) human recognition of robotic artificial emotions (organism), and (3) human responses to robotic emotions (response), as well as (4) other contingencies that affect emotions as moderators.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110344
Author(s):  
Bjørn Sletto ◽  
Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre ◽  
Alexandra Magaly Lamina Luguana ◽  
Davi Pereira Júnior

Post-representational cartography views maps as inherently unstable and unfinished, always in the making and thus singularly open for refolding and re-presentation. This perspective on maps calls for greater attention to the performances, negotiations, and contestations that occur during the ongoing production of maps, particularly in cases where maps are developed during collective, collaborative, and participatory processes in indigenous landscapes riven by conflict and struggle. In the following, we examine the role of walking for the continual (re)making of participatory maps, specifically engaging with work in indigenous methodologies to consider how an emphasis on performativity in map-makings may foster a post-representational perspective on indigenous cartographies. We understand walking as map-making, a form of knowledge production generated by performative and situated storytelling along paths and in places filled with meaning. Drawing on a critical understanding of ‘invitation’ and ‘crossing’, we build on our experiences from participatory mapping projects in Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Brazil to explore the ways in which the material, performative crossings of bodies through indigenous landscapes may inspire new forms of knowledge production and destabilize Cartesian cartographic colonialities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630512098105
Author(s):  
Diana Ingenhoff ◽  
Giada Calamai ◽  
Efe Sevin

This article presents a study of Twitter-based communication in order to identify key influencers and to assess the role of their communication in shaping country images. The analysis is based on a 2-month dataset comprised of all tweets including hashtags of the three countries selected for this study: Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Following a two-step flow model of communication, we initially identified the influential Twitter users in all three countries based on their centrality measures. Subsequently, we carried out a qualitative content analysis of tweets posted by these influential users. Finally, we assessed the similarities and differences across the three country cases. This article offers new insights into public diplomacy 2.0 activities by discussing influence within the context of country images and demonstrating how opinion leaders can play a more dominant role than states or other political actors in creating and disseminating content related to country image. The findings also provide practical insights in the production of a country’s image and its representation on new media platforms.


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