Leveraging Culture and History to Support Healthy, Resilient & Just Communities

Description:
Urbanization, migration, and cultural transformation are among the most significant processes to affect the human condition over the last century.  As culturally diverse groups converge in relatively compact urban areas, new patterns of community formation, health risk, and environmental inequity constantly emerge and merge.  A major challenge we now confront is how to create and maintain healthy, just, and resilient communities in the face of these often unpredictable changes.  The broad goals of this project are to (1) leverage Anthropological tools to develop how we address the effect of culture on health and environmental disparities in urban migrant communities and (2) develop new models for the use of socially-embedded research to promote community goals. This will also allow us to (3) disseminate better ways to operationalize 'culture' in problem-driven social science research.  To provide cohesion to our efforts, we are focusing on the case of South Phoenix, a local urban community containing a large Mexican migrant population. South Phoenix residents carry disproportionate health and environmental burdens related to current and historic risk factors such as migrant or minority status, erratic and low-paying employment, poor quality of neighborhood amenities, lack of access to affordable health care and healthy food, poor air quality, and excess heat. By combining Anthropological and related social science fieldwork with a series of workshops and systematic graduate student ethnographic training, this project aims to improve our capacity to test culture's explanatory value for understanding the processes that underlie spatial and temporal changes in urban health and environmental risks at the household and community level.