Primary Submission Category: Structural factors
For People Who Read Dangerously: On Epistemic Violence, (Creative) Resistance, and the Future of Population Health
Authors: Ryan Petteway,
Presenting Author: Ryan Petteway*
“When our worlds are literally crumbling, we tell ourselves how right they may have been, our elders, about our passive careers as distant witnesses” Edwidge Danticat
Epistemic violence is a cornerstone of much population health training and research. This is discernible within dominant population health research practices that (re)generate singular damage-centered narratives of communities situated at the margins as “vulnerable” and “at-risk”. These practice norms are established/perpetuated by curricular/accreditation guidelines within which matters of epistemology and power—what counts as knowledge, whose knowledges count, who gets counted, who does the counting—are omitted from so-called “foundational” competencies. These standards have systematically silenced ways of knowing/knowledges embodied by those at the margins, impeding collective understanding and suppressing narratives with the potential to disrupt power relations that drive health inequities. These dynamics fundamentally confound population health training/research—constraining our imaginations and curtailing our capacities/demands for social action. Further compounding these matters are explicit acts of state-sanctioned violence, silence, and erasure committed by the current political regime intended to render those at the margins invisible. As population health educators/scholars, we must ask ourselves–will we simply bear witness from a distance? Or will we choose to teach/train for those who read dangerously?
In this spirit, I engage critical, Black feminist, and decolonial theory to outline a population health “for people who read dangerously”—with a focus on pedagogy/training. Drawing from notions of “creating dangerously” and “fugitive pedagogies”, I discuss applications of creative and decolonized approaches within my own teaching and research that center considerations of epistemic justice. In doing so, I articulate a vision for population health futures within which every syllabus/research manuscript is written for those who know what it means to live and die (prematurely) in the struggle for health justice. That we must teach, research, and write dangerously for our future selves to read dangerously.