The South Phoenix Collaborative: Leveraging Culture & History to Support Healthy, Resilient and Just Communities

The South Phoenix Collaborative Field Team

Description:
Given the massive cultural, social and ecological transformations created by such linked global processes as migration, urbanization and the emergence of new diseases, a major challenge we now confront is how to create and maintain healthy, just and resilient communities. The broad goals of this project are to (1) leverage transdisciplinary tools to study the effect of culture on health and environmental disparities and (2) develop new models for the use of socially engaged research to promote community goals. To focus and socially embed our efforts we will use the case of urban south Phoenix, a vibrant, predominantly migrant urban Latino community where health and environmental inequities have been concentrated and become institutionalized over time. As communities like south Phoenix move forward into an uncertain future, creative solutions that take into account this history and the existing cultural knowledge of residents and that identify effective socially-based strategies already employed now or in the past should provide a solid basis for supporting positive health and environmental change at the community level. Through integrating collaborative research, undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate training and extensive community liaison into the project, we also aim to not only support our community partners' efforts to create sustainable health and environmental solutions for this community, but also develop, test and disseminate better ways to operationalize 'culture' in problem-driven social science
research and intervention design.
 

To coordinate diverse and interwoven efforts by a wide range of social and allied life scientists at ASU with our community partners, this Late Lessons in Early History project has developed and is managing "The South Phoenix Collaborative." The collaborative includes a broad range of some 40 scientists at ASU with skills related to understanding multiple dimensions and levels of health and environmental risk at the community level.

Late Lessons from Early History

The South Phoenix Collaborative