Measuring racial health equity in social care research

Speakers: Crystal Cené (UC San Diego Health), Monica Peek (University of Chicago Medicine), Ryan Petteway (Oregon Health & Science University–Portland State University School of Public Health)

00:00 Fireside Chat with Crystal Cené and Monica Peek
Each year an increasing number of original research articles are published about healthcare-based social care programs and policies. However, relatively few of these studies measure the impact of social care interventions on different racial or ethnic minority groups. More information about differential impacts could help to improve the implementation – and ideally the impacts – of social care. Physician scientists Crystal Cené and Monica Peek briefly shared findings from a recent review they co-led, funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), which involved a collaboration with researchers from both RTI and SIREN. Drs. Peek and Cené in this fireside chat explored what counts as measuring racial health equity (including how they developed a novel framework on “thoughtfulness” and “informativeness”), how much (or little) racial health equity has been explicitly described or measured in the social care interventions evidence base to date, and concrete next steps for researchers and practitioners that can strengthen the racial health equity implications of their work. Participants were also able to ask questions of the speakers using the Q&A function.

39:19 Two Poems for Poetic Health Justice: Poetry as Praxis for an Antiracist and Decolonized Future of ‘Radical Possibility’ with Ryan Petteway
Health research remains ensconced in a heavily positivist, reductionist, settler-colonial, racial-capitalist “ritual” of knowledge extractivism and expropriation wherein credentialed researchers mine marginalized communities for data to (re)package and (re)distribute as their (our) own knowledge. Much of this work has focused on racial health inequities while, curiously, leaving unexamined matters of positionality, epistemic equity, and procedural justice in the production and curation of knowledges/narratives about racialized subjects (here, perhaps better described as “objects”). In the US, this production is dominated and curated mostly by White scholars—from tenure-track faculty positions, to funding review panels, to editorial boards, to peer-review bodies. In short, the public/medical health knowledge production and curation enterprise is structurally racist, and it is time that we confront the inherent contradictions of a health equity discourse that fails to interrogate the racialized power dynamics that animate it. Moreover, it is time that we remix the canon and forge a future health research capable of doing our health narratives epistemic—and poetic—justice. In this spirit, Ryan draws from social epidemiology, critical, critical race, Black feminist, and decolonizing theory literatures to engage poetry as a site of “radical openness and possibility” (hooks)—an inclusive space of resistance for the production of counternarratives within discourse of health (in)equity. “Something, Something, Something by Race, 2021” and “RELATIVES//Risks” enact public health critical race praxis (Ford & Airhihenbuwa) principles of “voice” and “disciplinary self-critique” as mode of resistance to counter the epistemic violence of our structurally racist and racial-capitalist health inequities research enterprise. In each poem, Ryan foregrounds considerations of epistemic justice/oppression, data (in)justice, and narrative power—illustrating poetry as praxis to challenge public health’s history of violence against our bodies, its (re)colonization of our lives, and its (a)political silence on matters of epistemic and social injustice. These works suggest the epistemological, ethical, and material imperative of remixing/reimagining health knowledge production, expression, and curation practices to more fully—and unapologetically—"center the margins,” with poetry a necessary format of health equity discourse for resistance and healing.

"something something something by race, 2021" Available here.

"RELATIVES//Risks" Available here.