Hosted by the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research
This session will focus on power, privilege, and oppression in research, and explore strategies for researchers to engage with oppression-impacted communities in a more ethical and productive way. Four community members and researchers will share their perspectives on intersectionality in research, and offer suggestions and strategies for initiating and sustaining equitable partnerships to improve the relevance and impact of public health research.
Panelists:
Tamara Oyola-Santiago, MA, MPH, MCHES, is a harm reductionist and public health educator. She is co-founder of Bronx Móvil, a fully bilingual (Spanish/English) anti-racist mutual aid collective and mobile harm reduction and syringe services organization. She is also part of the What Would an HIV Doula Do collective, a community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS Crisis, and Director of Public Health Services at The New School.
Camila Gelpí-Acosta, PhD, is a Puerto Rican cis female with 25+ years of implementing harm reduction programming in Puerto Rico and in NYC. She also conducts NIH extramural research in NYC, specializing on the disease and overdose vulnerabilities of Puerto Rican PWID.
Terrell Jones is the Advocacy and Community Engagement Manager at OnPoint NYC. Terrell is a passionate advocate, activist, and inspiration for drug users, sex workers, the homeless, and other marginalized communities. Terrell Jones is a former drug user who, like many other people of color, was incarcerated because of his drug use. Determined to change the racist drug laws in New York State, stigma associated with drug use and that often resulted in his being denied job and housing opportunities, Terrell became an advocate for drug policy reform, an activist to advance harm reduction throughout New York City and New York State, and a vocal supporter of giving people a second chance. Terrell has now been in the harm reduction field for over 19 years and worked his way up from participant, to peer educator, to staff, and now to the management team.
David Frank, PhD, is a Medical Sociologist and Research Scientist at the NYU School of Global Public Health. His research focuses primarily on opioid use, opioid use treatment programs like Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT), and the structural and policy context in which opioid use and treatment occurs within. He is also someone who has been on methadone maintenance treatment for more than 15 years and uses those experiences in his research to produce scholarship that more accurately reflects the lives and real-world experiences of people who use illegal substances.
About the Increasing Research Relevance Through Community Collaboration Series
Community-engaged research in which community members are true collaborative partners has greater potential for public health relevance than does the traditional model, in which researchers make all of the decisions. True collaboration means the community is an equal research partner with a say in identifying problems, framing research questions and designing projects. Integrating experiential and scientific knowledge builds community capacity and sensitizes researchers to the real impacts of social determinants of health. This is especially important in intervention research, where foundational community input can improve acceptability, feasibility and sustainability. In this series, researchers and community partners will describe collaborative frameworks and share lessons learned from their experiences, including strategies for overcoming historic mistrust and other challenges to establishing equitable partnerships. This series was created in collaboration with our CDUHR Community Coalition.