I Am Not Your Data, PT.I: Poetry as Praxis + Illumination for a Public Health of Resistance + Healing
6:30pm to 8:00pm, Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Public Health Portland Style is FREE and open to all. Follow the link below to register. The panel discussion will also be live-streamed on OHSU’s Facebook page and available for viewing on the SPH website afterwards.
So much of public health is built upon the bodies of the oppressed. Literally. The path to health equity is lined with our samples and specimens—Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, poor, immigrant, and so on. Bodies broken open in the name of equity. Entire lives, communities, and histories reduced to “n’s” and distilled into odds ratios and relative risks. Data. Stories are being written, tales are being told. And we… are being regressed. In this epic of health equity, it is time we interrogate who the protagonists and narrators are. It is time for new dialogues to humanize and (re)center the voice and agency of those most burdened by the social inequity manifest as health inequities. This session will discuss poetry as a site of (re)imagination and remedy, a source of resistance and healing, a mode of reclaiming and restoration, and a necessary format of scholarly discourse of health equity and social justice. Speakers will bring a creative, critical lens on the relevance and power of poetry in (re)creating/reclaiming narratives of health—here, as related to racial health inequities and matters of intersectionality therein. In a time when love and resistance must be simultaneous acts, come hear (and feel) why “poetry is not a luxury.”
Moderator
Dr. Ryan J. Petteway is a social epidemiologist and assistant professor in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. His applied research integrates social epidemiology, critical theory, decolonizing methods, and CBPR/YPAR to examine notions of place, embodiment, and “placemaking” in community health, making use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to democratize research and practice processes. He thinks ANOVA GEE would be an interesting choice for a child’s name, and is convinced that BDP can tell us more about health than TPB. Dr. Petteway is also an award-winning poet, and is currently developing a book of poetry exploring intersections of structural racism, racialized police violence, public health, and COVID19. His poem “LATENT//Missing”, was the first poem published in Health Education & Behavior, and the first work of public health scholarship to use poetry as a format for critical commentary and analysis of structural racism and COVID-19. You can learn more about his research and creative works here.
Panelists
Dr. LeConté Dill is a native of South Central Los Angeles and is currently creating a homeplace in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. She is a community-accountable scholar, educator, and poet. Dr. Dill holds degrees from Spelman College, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of California Berkeley. Guided by Black Feminist epistemologies and using qualitative and arts-based research methods, she has a commitment toward transdisciplinary research. Dr. Dill listens to and shows up for urban Black girls and other youth of color and works to rigorously document their experiences of violence, safety, resistance, and wellness. Currently, she is the Director of Public Health Practice and a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University. Additionally, since 2015, she has been a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Dr. Walidah Imarisha, Director of the Center for Black Studies and Assistant Professor in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University. Imarisha is an educator and a writer. She is the co-editor of two anthologies, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and Another World is Possible. Imarisha is also the author of Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption, which won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. She spent 6 years with Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project as a public scholar facilitating programs across the state about Oregon Black history and other topics. In 2015, she received a Tiptree Fellowship for her science fiction writing. In the past, Imarisha has taught at Stanford University, Oregon State University, and Pacific Northwest College of the Arts.