Transborder Community Development and Health
By developing a program of social science research and teaching with an emphasis on community development and health, students concentrate on patterns of physical, mental and social health disparities closely associated with poverty, limited access to insurance, reliance on emergency measures and facilities, differential health care, and learn how to develop the appropriate mitigating applied programs. Other applied foci will include environmental home health, vulnerable population well-being through the life cycle, work and labor accidents, ecological and environmental degradation, and epidemiological trends and issues of Mexican-origin and Latina/o populations. The department enjoys the presence of one medical anthropologist, and we will search for one more person in a medically-oriented social science or policy area. Deeply embedded within local and transborder communities, methodological instruction and skills will be especially stressed.
Faculty
Hilda Garcia-Pérez, who earned a doctorate in social epidemiology and demography, researches the influence of morbidity and health-seeking behavior of women in urban areas of northern Mexico and the Southwest borderlands and the epidemiology of Southwest North America. She is currently publishing numerous research articles in Spanish and English in major academic arenas.
Seline Szkupinski-Quiroga received her doctorate in medical anthropology. She explores discourses of race, gender and identity as they emerge in illness narratives, and engages in Latino health research with a special interest in ethnic and cultural responses to bodily disorders and health status disparities. Her first major monograph will be published by Rutger’s University Press in 2010. In summer 2008, she received a grant to study health and wellness in south Phoenix, Ariz.
The South Mountain Village Community Study
The South Mountain Village Community Study (funded by the National Science Foundation) uses a combination of tools from Anthropology, Geography, and the Health Sciences to examine the ways in which cultural variation becomes embodied as health differentials within resource-poor urban neighborhoods. A goal of the project is to determine how cultural processes (such as social networks and household economic strategies) and cultural knowledge (such as Latino/a understandings of food, healing, and local environments) can be harnessed to build healthier and more just communities, even under conditions of rapid social, demographic, and economic change and uncertainty such as found in large, diverse cities like Phoenix. A particular focus is on the processes that relate to children's risk of obesity and diabetes, because the rates of these diseases are very high even among young children in this community and only appear to be growing. The project is committed community-based research, and to providing research experience to ASU undergraduates.
Lead Faculty:
Alexandra Brewis, SHESC
Christopher Boone, School of Sustainability
Gerardo Chowell Puente, SHESC
Jennifer Glick, School of Social and Family Dynamics/Center for Population Dynamics
Seline Szkupinski Quiroga, Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies
Donna Winham, Nutrition
Amber Wutich, SHESC
Building a Transborder Observatory for Health at the U.S.-Mexico Border:
A Case Study of Access to Health Services
The overall purpose of this project is to create an interdisciplinary, inter- institutional working group to build a Transborder Observatory for Health at the U.S. Mexico border with participation of the University of Arizona, Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health; the Department of Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies and the School of Planning at Arizona State University; El Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo, El Colegio de Sonora; la Universidad de Sonora; the Arizona Department of Health Services, and the Pan American Health Organization, El Paso Field Office.
In addition to building the Transborder Observatory for Health at the U.S.-Mexico border, the working group will develop a model of guiding principles to formulate a place-based regional approach for public health research and evaluation of best practices in the border region. Utilizing these guiding principles as a framework for analysis, the group will conduct a systematic review of access to primary health care services, health promotion and disease prevention services; and promotora outreach programs in the Ambos Nogales region. It is hoped that this review will provide the basis for policy recommendations improving the health of migrant and transborder populations in the borderlands.
Ultimately, this project will contribute to current efforts at ASU and partners universities to strengthen methodological approaches that translate public health research into action to improve access to services in the Sonora- Arizona region.