Black Bodies, Black Health

Image credit: Chidiebere Ibe

Black Bodies, Black Health is a one-year research project, supported by a $725,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Through seed grants, workshops, conferences and both scholarly and public writing, Black Bodies, Black Health incentivizes humanists, social scientists, and biomedical researchers to engage in interdisciplinary work to explore and unpack structural racism in service of creating equitable health outcomes.

Black Bodies, Black Health Steering Committee

Building an Inter-Disciplinary Conversation

Led by PIs Anna Branch and Michelle Stephens, the Steering Committee of Black Bodies, Black Health: Imagining a Just Racial Future focuses on organizing cross-disciplinary discussion groups of experts to wrestle with the question: What would we learn from bringing humanists, social scientists, and biomedical researchers to the table to explore, unpack, and disrupt structural racism in service of creating equitable health outcomes?

With a wide and diverse range of expertise, steering committee members help to frame the seed grant program that incentivizes and organizes Rutgers researchers, and the interdisciplinary workshops and conversations convened to synthesize and develop their specific research projects. Steering Committee members will contribute to the project’s final report identifying the research needed in humanistic and social scientific fields to ameliorate structural racism as a determinant of health and wellbeing.

Anna Branch

Black Bodies, Black Health Research Project Lead, Senior Vice President for Equity at Rutgers University, and Professor of Sociology at Rutgers-New Brunswick

Carlos Decena

Professor, Latino and Caribbean Studies, School of Arts and Sciences New Brunswick; ISGRJ Cross Campus Director for Undergraduate Intellectual Life and Associate Director ISGRJ-New Brunswick

Perry Halkitis

Dean and Professor of Biostatistics and Urban-Global Public Health at the School of Public Health; founder and director of the Center for Health, Identity, Behavior & Prevention Studies (CHIBPS)

Shawna Hudson

Professor and Research Division Chief, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Dawne Mouzon

Associate Professor of Sociology, School of Arts and Sciences, New Brunswick

Luis Rivera

Associate Professor of Psychology, School of Arts and Sciences, Newark and Director of the Rutgers Implicit Social Cognition (RISC) Lab

Seed Grants

The Black Bodies, Black Health project provided seed grants for 2022 and 2023 to support a range of multi-disciplinary research projects that focus on forms of physician education; the carceral state; environmental racism; the physiological impact of racism on black bodies; and ethics and decolonial justice in global health.

Physician Education

Researchers in fields as diverse as applied psychology (Alexandria Bauer, GSAPP NB), history (Johanna Schoen, SAS NB) and medicine (Pamela Brug, RBHS), examine such topics as communication between doctors and black families in neonatal ICUs, the impact of cultural humility among physicians, and the effectivity of technological solutions to uniting like-minded patients and physicians.

Environmental Racism

Studies of the impact of environmental racism on health outcomes by researchers from the environmental sciences (Anita Bakshi, SEBS NB), nursing (Wanda Williams and Mei Fu, SON CMD) and history (Rachel Devlin, SAS NB) focus on environmental justice and indigeneity, the impact of place-based versus person-based barriers on rates of breast cancer screenings among black women, and a micro-history of the impact of environmental racism on a southern black community.

Global Health

Research initiatives focus on the intersections of population ethics and health in African spaces or poor-resources settings, and the role of histories of colonization in continuing health inequities around the globe.

Black Bodies

Researchers from applied psychology (Peter Economou, GSAPP NB) and labor relations (Yana Rodgers, SMLR NB) study racism as a contributor to physiological stress in black athletes and black women in the labor market.

The Carceral State

As a crucial contemporary instance of the institutionalization of systemic, structural racism with negative health outcomes, scholars from philosophy (Lauren Lyons, SAS NB), psychology (Lori Hoggard, SAS NB) nursing (Ann Bagchi, RBHS) and social work (Maxine Davis, SSW NB), are studying the ethics of carceral justice...

BBBH News

Immigrant Women and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Intersectional Analysis of Frontline Occupational Crowding in the United States

Read the newly published paper by the Rutgers Center for Women and Work, including Labor Studies and Employment Relations Professor and BBBH Seed Grantee Yana van der Meulen Rodgers in the Forum for Social Economics Journal.

The paper examines changes in occupational crowding of immigrant women in frontline industries in the United States during the onset of COVID-19, and we contextualize their experiences against the backdrop of broader race-based and gender-based occupational crowding.

Our Land, Our Stories: Native American Acknowledgement Garden Event

Born out of a landscape architecture course taught by Assistant Professor of Teaching, and BBBH Seed Grantee Anita Bakshi, the Our Land, Our Stories project brings together the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Ramapough Lunaape Nation to focus on environmental justice advocacy. In Spring 2022 their team received a grant to create a garden on campus to celebrate the continued presence of Indigenous communities in our state. Watch a recap of the event held at Rutgers Gardens.