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"Field Work: Deaf Refugee Farmers, Literature, and Public Health Humanities."
This presentation brings education, advocacy, and informal field research together with a reading of literature. Based in the disciplinary framework of public health humanities, Garden explores the ways that insights from literature—specifically Kao Kalia Yang’s autobiographical writing on her own and her family’s experiences as refugees—can illuminate understandings of health disparities and clinical healthcare. She discusses the ways these insights impact her teaching and also advocacy within her community, including working on a farm at the urban edge with deaf Bhutanese New Americans.
Rebecca Garden is John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science; Associate Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine; Executive Director, Consortium for Culture and Medicine, SUNY Upstate. With support from the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities.