Directed by Professor Michael Hanchard, the Marginalized Populations project is a collaborative research initiative designed to explore political dynamics between populations with unequal, minimal or non-existent state protections and national governments. Black peoples in the Americas and other parts of the world have often lived in societies without formal rights and state protections, on a continuum of citizenship ranging from outright exclusion to full citizenship in civil societies. Scholarship and activism emanating from these communities provide opportunities for students and faculty to consider, in comparative perspective, how political actors from marginalized communities in various parts of the world make political claims, and affect national policy and human rights debates. Members of the Penn and Philadelphia scholarly community will participate in seminars, speaker series, and conferences with invited activists, scholars and policy makers from various parts of the world.
NCDHHS is partnering with key influencers who represent the communities hardest hit by COVID-19 to deliver messages about precautions, testing and contact tracing that resonate with historically marginalized populations. The Department has been working with Radio One, whose market includes urban areas and communities of color, to air a series of preventive messages from prominent leaders, including former Congresswoman Eva Clayton, faith leader Reverend Prince R. Rivers and physician Dr. Roxie Wells.
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In addition to the radio ads, NCDHHS is releasing video messages. The videos cover a range of topics, including mental health self-care to promote resiliency, coping strategies for historically marginalized populations and guidance on the 3 Ws: wear a face covering, wait six feet from others and wash hands often to protect yourself and others from COVID-19. People are encouraged to share the messages widely using social media and share with members of their family and communities.
Purpose: Mental health disparities exist across several dimensions of social inequality, including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status and gender. Most investigations of health disparities focus on one dimension. Recent calls by researchers argue for studying persons who are marginalized in multiple ways, often from the perspective of intersectionality, a theoretical framework applied to qualitative studies in law, sociology, and psychology. Quantitative adaptations are emerging but there is little guidance as to what measures or methods are helpful.
Methods: Here, we consider the concept of a joint disparity and its composition, show that this approach can illuminate how outcomes are patterned for social groups that are marginalized across multiple axes of social inequality, and compare the insights gained with that of other measures of additive interaction. We apply these methods to a cohort of young men from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, examining disparities for black men with low early life SES vs. white men with high early life SES across several outcomes that predict mental health, including unemployment, wages, and incarceration.
Intersectionality is a term used to describe the intersecting effects of race, class, gender, and other marginalizing characteristics that contribute to social identity and affect health. Adverse health effects are thought to occur via social processes including discrimination and structural inequalities (i.e., reduced opportunities for education and income). Although intersectionality has been well-described conceptually, approaches to modeling it in quantitative studies of health outcomes are still emerging. Strategies to date have focused on modeling demographic characteristics as proxies for structural inequality. Our objective was to extend these methodological efforts by modeling intersectionality across three levels: structural, contextual, and interpersonal, consistent with a social-ecological framework. We conducted a secondary analysis of a database that included two components of a widely used survey instrument, the Everyday Discrimination Scale. We operationalized a meso- or interpersonal-level of intersectionality using two variables, the frequency score of discrimination experiences and the sum of characteristics listed as reasons for these (i.e., the person's race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, disability or pregnancy status, or physical appearance). We controlled for two structural inequality factors (low education, poverty) and three contextual factors (high crime neighborhood, racial minority status, and trauma exposures). The outcome variables we modeled were posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and a quality of life index score. We used data from 619 women who completed the Everyday Discrimination Scale for a perinatal study in the U.S. state of Michigan. Statistical results indicated that the two interpersonal-level variables (i.e., number of marginalized identities, frequency of discrimination) explained 15% of variance in posttraumatic stress symptoms and 13% of variance in quality of life scores, improving the predictive value of the models over those using structural inequality and contextual factors alone. This study's results point to instrument development ideas to improve the statistical modeling of intersectionality in health and social science research.
According to the report, some States are taking advantage of their legitimate obligation to regulate areas such as counter-terrorism to target the activities of marginalized groups. Moreover, surveillance tactics ostensibly designed to prevent criminal activity are often used selectively to target certain groups who plan to stage peaceful assemblies.
The impacts of plastics on marginalized populations are severe, and exist at all stages of the production cycle, from extracting raw materials and manufacturing, through to consumption and disposal, according to the report.
Other actors such as business and industry leaders, non-governmental actors, and consumers should also make efforts to reverse the situations for those who are socially, economically, politically marginalized.
As we look forward to International Women's Day, UNDRR is celebrating the work of women working in disaster risk reduction who are speaking up for marginalized groups and changing the way governments respond to COVID-19 to ensure that no one is left behind.
Pratima Gurung is an intersectional activist from Nepal. She leads the National Indigenous Disabled Women Association Nepal (NIDWAN) and is a faculty member at Padma Kanya College in Kathmandu. During the COVID-19 pandemic she has helped marginalized communities by pushing government to adapt messages and support so everyone can understand and access critical health services.
A Coastal Resilience Center research team, led by Dr. Cassandra R. Davis of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has released a report that explores the disproportionate impacts of federal mitigation assistance on socially marginalized groups and under-resourced neighborhoods. The purpose of the report, Support Strategies for Socially Marginalized Neighborhoods Likely Impacted by Natural Hazards, is to improve mitigation efforts by addressing equity in emergency management, ultimately supporting the creation of national policy for federal organizations including FEMA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and others.
Elliott R Weinstein, MPH, M.S., is a 4th year clinical-health psychology PhD student at the University of Miami with an interest in how to address HIV and mental health disparities among marginalized populations.
In 2021, Hispanic/Latinx individuals had the lowest rate of PrEP use among all races/ethnicities despite accounting for 26% of new HIV diagnoses. What strategies should researchers and public health officials employ to work towards expanding PrEP use among LMSM and other marginalized populations?
The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) invites civil society organizations (CSOs) to submit applications for projects that have the goal to promote and protect Freedom of Expression (FoE) for vulnerable or marginalized populations. The focus should include women and girls in all their diversity; LGBTQI+ persons, transgender or gender-diverse persons in particular; migrants; members of marginalized racial, ethnic, and Indigenous communities, religious minority group members; and others targeted by anti-rights actors. These actors deploy targeted threats and instrumentalized stigma against such groups in order to chill freedom of speech and limit democratic participation, leading to the erosion of democratic institutions, rule of law, access to justice, and fundamental freedoms of expression, assembly, and association (e.g. creating and disseminating disinformation in order to pass legislation that is discriminatory in intent or impact; repeatedly targeting civil society organizations working for the human rights of vulnerable populations with strategic lawsuits against public participation, etc.)
This request is for proposals from CSOs working to promote and protect FoE for vulnerable and marginalized communities whose fundamental freedoms and human rights are under targeted attack, as a result of strategic efforts to curtail progress toward equality in access to and enjoyment of human rights for all persons. FoE, including the rights to freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and the right to petition the government, broadly refers to the ability of persons to freely hold and express their own beliefs, without interference from governments both online and in-person. In many contexts, Freedom of Expression for vulnerable and marginalized communities is infringed by discriminatory legislation, government persecution, targeted attacks on civil society and its operating space, and orchestrated attacks by those opposed to equal recognition of human rights for all persons, universally. 2ff7e9595c
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