Search

This community-based participatory research study explores the influence of structural racism on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) inequities among immigrant, including refugee, youth. We conducted interviews with emerging youth and youth service providers living in two communities in Massachusetts. Our results detail three major themes illustrating how structural racism influences SRH inequities among immigrant youth: (1) lack of culture-centered SRH supports for recently immigrated youth; (2) immigration enforcement and fear impacting access to adolescent SRH (ASRH) education and services; and (3) perceived ineligibility related to tenuous legal status as a barrier to accessing ASRH services. Conclusions: Findings illustrate the importance of rooting sexuality education curricula in a culture centered framework that recognizes local cultural understandings, acknowledges structural constraints faced by young people, and prioritizes youth agency and voice when engaging in this work. Raising awareness of SRH resources available to immigrant youth may expand access for this underserved population.

This special collection of Health Promotion Practice introduces critical narrative intervention (CNI) as a key theoretical framing for an asset-based, narrative, and participatory approach to promoting health and addressing social inequality. Innovative digital and visual methodologies highlighted in this special collection—comics and graphic novels, cellphilms and other participatory film, story booths, digital storytelling, and photovoice—are changing the way critical public health researchers and practitioners forge new knowledge, creating new possibilities for interdisciplinary and activist-based inquiry. Public health research and engagement efforts that critically contend with historically repressive structures and intervene through narrative and participatory processes to enact change with and for disenfranchised communities are long overdue. This special collection showcases six CNI projects that promote equity and justice in the context of LGBTQ, nonbinary, and other gender-diverse young people; people who inject drugs living with hepatitis C virus; young women who trade sex; undocumented and formerly undocumented immigrants; and people living with HIV/AIDS. It is our intent that this collection of exemplars can serve as a guidepost for practitioners and researchers interested in expanding the scope of critical public health praxis. Individually and collectively, the special collection illustrates how CNI can create space for the increased representation of historically silenced populations, redress stigma, and provoke important questions to guide a new era of health equity research.

Few public schools in Massachusetts offer a sex-positive, inclusive sexuality education curriculum at the elementary school level. One Massachusetts public elementary school identified the need for...

When it is offered, sexuality education in the USA is far from standardized. While studies have explored differences in delivery and type of sexuality education across the USA, sexual and reproductive health inequities persist among historically marginalized groups (Latino/a/x, Black, African American, LGBTQ +). There is a critical need to better understand the systemic barriers to receiving effective sexuality education in these communities.Participatory research methods were used in working with a community advisory board (CAB)-consisting of emerging adults and service providers from community-based organizations (CBOs) serving youth-to examine how structural barriers contribute to adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH) inequities in Massachusetts. CAB meetings and semi-structured interviews were conducted in the cities of Springfield (Inflexible funding guidelines, a related evidence-based curricular mandate, and a lack of community-responsive sexuality education fail to meet the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs of these youth.Current evidence-based mandates must be revisited to improve young people's access to quality sexuality information in public schools. To guarantee sexuality education curricula is centered in the context of the community and population in which it is implemented, collaboration between youth-serving CBOs and school districts could improve students' overall experience and social-emotional growth by providing comprehensive, positive, and community-responsive curricula.Funders and programming should prioritize community responsiveness by financially supporting and developing and/or adapting evidence-based curricula to better match the community's needs, which can be completed through culture-centered training and community-based partnership.

BackgroundLow/no-income Latino men are disproportionately burdened by chronic disease morbidity and mortality, which is often compounded by persistent exposure to stress. Chronic stress is a key mediating factor in pathways linking macro-level socio-structural forces to micro-level behavioral factors with negative health outcomes. Being that Latinxs continue to be one of the fastest growing populations in the U.S., it is imperative to better understand the roots of stress pathways and explore multi-level interventions.MethodsThis study presents qualitative findings from in-depth interviews with Puerto Rican men (95%) living in Springfield, Massachusetts. We utilized the Minority Stress Model (MSM) first posited by Ilan Meyers, as a framework to understand stress and stress processes amongst Puerto Rican men. We mapped our data onto Meyers' MSM, which allowed us to find diverging themes and identify areas for expansion.ResultsAs expected, participants reported stress rooted in experiences of racism and prejudice, expectations of rejection, English-language acquisition, family relationships, insecure housing, precarious employment, and lack of resources. Nevertheless, the MSM did not account for the historical contexts that, as our findings indicate, are used to filter and understand their experiences with everyday stressors. Participants described and linked histories of colonial violence and movement and migration to their stress and community wellbeing.DiscussionFindings suggest the need to expand the current MSM and our conceptualization of the stress process to include historical understandings when contextualizing present-day stress and future interventions. We propose an expanded heuristic model that delineates the impact of distinctive historical trajectories that aid in interpreting racial health disparities amongst minoritized populations. Future multi-level interventions should give weight to highlighting history and how this impacts the present, in this case including the culpability of U.S. policy regarding Puerto Rico and the adverse health effects for Puerto Rican men on the mainland.

This special collection of

Puerto Ricans experience disproportionately high levels of emotional distress and co-occurring adverse health outcomes. Our study sought to elicit Puerto Rican men's perceptions of health disparities while centering dialogue on stressors, coping mechanisms, and general well-being. This paper focuses on one pronounced finding in our study, that of internalized racism and the effect it has on both individual well-being and intra-group cohesion. A significant gap within racial health disparity work is the role of internalized racism and its connection to psychological distress, ruptures in social unity, and resulting ill-health of racial and ethnic populations. Based on this, we probed this particular finding to further understand internalized racism within this Puerto Rican population.Using a hybrid thematic analysis approach, this study presents qualitative findings from in-depth interviews with Latino (92.5% Puerto Rican) men living in Springfield, Massachusetts and conducted between October 2019 and January 2020.Our findings reveal a duality throughout: The acceptance and propagation of negative Latinx stereotypes and consequent intragroup division exists alongside expressions of community pride and desire for Latinx unity. This duality is analyzed by using W.E.B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness. Double consciousness not only explains the self-disparagement toward oneself and one's own racial and ethnic group, but also elucidates a liberatory pathway toward political consciousness and well-being. The concept of "second sight" within double consciousness is particularly germane, speaking to one's awakening to the learned self-subjugation imposed by White supremacy.Internalized racism contributes to the persistent propagation of disparate health burdens in minoritized communities. Remediation can and should include community-led frameworks for the development of efficacious multilevel health interventions. The Young Lords community health activism provides such a model. These findings provide viable evidence-based examples of how the academy can synergize with community-led efforts to achieve collective agency.

Opioid-related fatalities increased exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic and show little sign of abating. Despite decades of scientific evidence that sustained engagement with medications for opioid use disorders (MOUD) yields positive psychosocial outcomes, less than 30% of people with OUD engage in MOUD. Treatment rates are lowest for women. The aim of this project was to identify women-specific barriers and facilitators to treatment engagement, drawing from the lived experience of women in treatment. Data are provided from a parent study that used a community-partnered participatory research approach to adapt an evidence-based digital storytelling intervention for supporting continued MOUD treatment engagement. The parent study collected qualitative data between August and December 2018 from 20 women in Western Massachusetts who had received MOUD for at least 90 days. Using constructivist grounded theory, we identified major themes and selected illustrative quotations. Key barriers identified in this project include: (1) MOUD-specific discrimination encountered via social media, and in workplace and treatment/recovery settings; and (2) fear, perceptions, and experiences with MOUD, including mental health medication synergies, internalization of MOUD-related stigma, expectations of treatment duration, and opioid-specific mistrust of providers. Women identified two key facilitators to MOUD engagement: (1) feeling “safe” within treatment settings and (2) online communities as a source of positive reinforcement. We conclude with women-specific recommendations for research and interventions to improve MOUD engagement and provide human-centered care for this historically marginalized population.

Low/no-income, African American men are disproportionally burdened by chronic disease resulting from a complex interplay of systemic, sociocultural, and individual factors. These disparities are related to poverty, racism, gender role strain, high levels of stress, low levels of physical activity, and malnutritious diet. Men of Color Health Awareness (MOCHA) is a community-driven movement to address the physical, mental, social, and spiritual needs of men of color. As part of ongoing programming, the MOCHA Standard intervention consists of a 10-week program including: (1) small group discussions of issues particularly relevant to men of color, (2) classes on health topics focusing on chronic disease control, such as nutrition, obesity, high blood pressure, fitness, and the social determinants of health; and (3) 60-min of moderately intensive aerobic exercise twice a week. While the MOCHA Standard intervention has yielded positive results, feedback from previous participants warranted an in-depth sociocultural tailoring of the curriculum to improve community receptiveness, in particular, revising the sessions to "narrativize" the materials to strengthen their potential effectiveness. This manuscript describes the novel recruitment strategies; the development of an enhanced MOCHA+ Stories Matter program that uses narrative communication strategies; and the methodology used to assess the comparative effectiveness of the MOCHA Standard relative to MOCHA+ Stories Matter program in lowering stress and risk of chronic diseases in a randomized controlled trial. The results of this research will contribute to the identification of effective interventions to address health disparities in low-income African-American men and the dissemination of effective chronic disease prevention programming.

The familiar story about young pregnant and parenting Latinas relies on commonsense logic about the timing of reproductive lives. We explore young mothers' own sense making, captured in local vernacular through participants' digital story depictions, our fieldnotes of digital storytelling workshop talk, and participants' follow-up interview reflections about enduring judgment and doing their lives. In this article, we introduce the Hear Our Stories project and present key digital stories and related ethnographic material that serve as local exemplars of “doing your life.” Findings reveal ways participants negotiate value making about their reproductive lives. As a narrative intervention, digital storytelling helps to gain a firmer grasp on social worlds and to better understand inequality, while also engaging participants in a process that affords them the opportunity to shift from being a judged teen mom to co-creators of knowledge and change as strategic storytellers.

Most visual culture related to early childbearing represents pregnant and parenting teen bodies as sites of fear and disgust. The embodied experiences of pregnant and parenting young women ...

Drug scares have historically been created for a range of purposes and with a variety of effects in the United States. Moral panics evoked by these drug scares either support or challenge dominant American ideas about race, economics, and society. In the present study, we examined newspaper accounts of methamphetamine use in the Inland Pacific Northwest of the United States in an effort to understand how the "reality" of the "meth epidemic" is socially constructed in a "meth hotspot," and reflect upon the ways that the discourse of Whiteness intersects with this construction. For our analysis, we are cognizant of the "slipperiness" of the logic of Whiteness as a concept, and the ways that an alternative logic is articulated - one that strategically embraces or distances White drug users to support notions of White dominance. We focus on the possibility that individual meth users could then be portrayed pseudo-racially as "White trash," and thus rendered outside the logic of White racial order. Our findings center on two main themes: (1) the use of fear in the construction of the meth drug scare through the sensationalization of meth, its anthropomorphization, and the depiction of the threat of the White drug user; and (2) how the logic of Whiteness is discursively reconciled within this construction. Given current mediated discourses about drug use and health in the United States that center on the emergence of the White drug user as the face of the opioid crisis, we are well served to carefully consider the recent historical precedence of the "meth epidemic" in which the public was faced with reconciling their views about drug use and the intersection of race, class, and mainstream American identity.

This article focuses on findings of a two-year pilot research study focused on addressing sexual and reproductive health inequities faced by adolescent women of Puerto Rican descent living on the mainland United States. Working with three groups of young women, in the pilot study we gathered ethnographic data in and around a group-based digital storytelling process to inform the development of a larger intervention. Digital stories are short (1–3 minute), participant produced videos that synthesize still and moving image, a voiceover recording of the participant telling her story, and background music and text to document personal experiences. Based on narrative analysis of digital stories and field notes written in and around the digital storytelling workshop process, as well as follow-up individual interviews with workshop participants, our findings center on the ways that trauma has specifically shaped participants’ sexual and reproductive health experiences. We argue that digital storytelling serves as a critical narrative intervention, whereby participants’ engagement in the storytelling process enables them to collaboratively interrogate and potentially address prior trauma, bolster a sense of social support and solidarity, and potentially recalibrate stigmatizing conversations about them. We introduce our project methodology, and then present key findings on trauma as it informs sexual and reproductive health practices, with digital storytelling showcased as a modality for critical narrative intervention. We conclude by discussing implications for critical public health research and practice.

Substance use disorder (SUD) is a growing issue nationally, and SUD in pregnancy has significant consequences for mothers and their children. This article describes findings from a pilot project that used digital storytelling as a mechanism for understanding substance use and recovery from the perspective of women in recovery from SUD in pregnancy who worked as peer mentors with pregnant women currently experiencing SUD. Research on peer mentorship has primarily focused on outcomes for mentees but not the experience of the peer mentors themselves. In this qualitative study, a 3-day digital storytelling workshop was conducted with five women in recovery serving as peer mentors in their community. Each mentor also participated in an individual, in-depth interview. The digital storytelling workshop process helped peer mentors make linkages between their past substance use experiences to their present work of recovery, and fostered deep social connections between mentors through the shared experience. The workshop process also elicited a sense of hope among participants, which served as groundwork for developing advocacy-based efforts. Digital storytelling may be therapeutic for women in recovery and has the potential to be integrated into recovery programs to bolster hope and social support among participants.

We currently see an interdisciplinary shift toward a "participatory turn" in health research and promotion under which community engagement, shared decision making and planning, and the use of visual and digital methods have become paramount. Digital storytelling (DST) is one such innovative and engaging method increasingly used in applied health interventions, with a growing body of research identifying its value. Despite its increasing use, a standard approach to empirically assess the impacts on individuals participating in DST interventions does not currently exist. In this article, we define DST as a distinct narrative intervention, illustrate key elements that inform the methodology, and present a conceptual model to examine how DST may contribute to increased socioemotional well-being and bolster positive health outcomes. Our proposed model is informed by elements of narrative theory, Freirian conscientization, multimodality, and social cognitive theory and can serve as a guide for public health practitioners and researchers interested in assessing the potential benefits of DST as an applied health intervention. Recommendations for practice call for a rigorous methodological approach to apply and test this model across a range of health contexts and populations.

Public health efforts focused on Latina youth sexuality are most commonly framed by the syndemic of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, a narrow and often heteronormative focus that perpetuates silences that contribute to health inequities and overlooks the growing need for increased education, awareness, and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth. This article presents findings from the project Let's Talk About Sex: Digital Storytelling for Puerto Rican Latina Youth, which used a culturally centered, narrative-based approach for analyzing participants' own specifications of sexual values and practices. The strength of digital storytelling lies in its utility as an innovative tool for community-based and culturally situated research, as well as in its capacity to open up new spaces for health communication. Here we present two "coming out" case studies to illustrate the value of digital storytelling in supporting the development of meaningful and culturally relevant health promotion efforts for LGBTQ-identified Puerto Rican Latina youth across the life span.

Digital storytelling (DST) engages participants in a group-based process to create and share narrative accounts of life events. The process of individuals telling their own stories has not been well assessed as a mechanism of health behavior change. This study looks at outcomes associated with engaging in the DST process for vulnerable youth. The project focused on the experiences of Puerto Rican Latinas between the ages of 15 to 21. A total of 30 participants enrolled in a 4-day DST workshops, with 29 completing a 1 to 3-minute digital story. Self-reported data on several scales (self-esteem, social support, empowerment, and sexual attitudes and behaviors) were collected and analyzed. Participants showed an increase in positive social interactions from baseline to 3-month post workshop. Participants also demonstrated increases in optimism and control over the future immediately after the workshop, but this change was not sustained at 3 months. Analysis of qualitative results and implications are discussed.

Since the 2003 call by the Institute of Medicine to educate undergraduates in public health, various models have emerged for incorporating public health into the liberal arts and sciences. One model is a professionalized public health major that uses core public health competencies to prepare a workforce of health professionals. A second model offers a broad-based public health major rooted in liberal arts principles, resisting the utilitarian trend toward human capital formation. A third model resists even the label of “public health,” preferring instead to introduce undergraduates to many ways of analyzing human health and healing. The multidisciplinary Culture, Health, and Science Program, based on six key commitments for preparing liberal arts students to analyze health and respond to global health challenges, is offered as an alternative to the public health major.

The nexus of migration and family offers a conjuncture to enrich understanding of teen pregnancy and parenting. This article draws findings from a project centered on participant-produced new media to reveal how young mothers negotiate reproductive health disparities. We focus on young mothers' experiences of migration and movement, captured in local vernacular through participants' digital story depictions and follow-up interviews. We argue that disparities link up with the single story of teen mothering, involve public shaming, continue hand-in-hand with institutional humiliation, and are exacerbated through migration and movement. To disrupt the normative notions that shadow young mothers, we take seriously the young women's narratives. We theorize how the richness of stories and storytelling may serve as a potent intervention-a narrative shock-for articulating meanings and cultivating dignity for young mothers and their families, especially those who do not fit the sedentary and age biases of parenting ideals.

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a growing problem for pregnant and parenting women. Woman-to-woman peer support may positively influence perinatal outcomes but little is known about the impact of such support on the women who are providing support. The purpose of this study was to describe experiences of addiction in pregnancy, recovery, and subsequently serving as a peer mentor to other pregnant women with active SUD among women in recovery in a rural setting. We conducted one digital storytelling workshop with five women serving as peer mentors with lived experience of perinatal SUD. The mentors faced significant stigma in pregnancy. They had each done the “inside work” to achieve recovery, and maintained recovery by staying balanced. Peer mentoring supported their own recovery, and story sharing was integral to this process. Peer-led support models may be an effective, self-sustaining method of providing pregnancy-specific peer support for SUD.

Digital storytelling workshops are increasingly being used to capture lived experiences and develop/disseminate health promotion messages for vulnerable and marginalized populations. Thirty female Latina teens of varied sexual/parity status produced digital stories of significant life experiences in a group context and then viewed and evaluated them using the Narrative Quality Assessment Tool. This tool was used to examine participants' experience of emotional engagement and identification with each story as well as a single-item indicator of desire to "do something in my community" related to the story. Emotional engagement was moderately strong; identification scores were neutral relative to the stories. Emotional engagement was strongly, significantly related to "desire to act in my community," while identification was not related. Emotional engagement should be considered an important factor to incorporate in the production of digital stories for purposes of developing interest in social action beyond the digital storytelling workshop.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is part of Five-Colleges Inc, a consortium that includes the university and four liberal arts colleges. Consortium faculty from the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the university and from the colleges are working to bridge liberal arts with public health graduate education. We outline four key themes guiding this effort and exemplary curricular tools for innovative community-based and multidisciplinary academic and research programs. The structure of the consortium has created a novel trajectory for student learning and engagement, with important ramifications for pedagogy and professional practice in public health. We show how graduate public health education and liberal arts can, and must, work in tandem to transform public health practice in the 21st century.

Pregnant and parenting young women are simultaneously silenced and overrepresented by raced and classed social narratives on adolescent childbearing in the United States. These narratives posit teen childbearing as an unequivocal social, health, and economic problem, although some scholars and policy makers construct alternative narratives that focus on inequalities and propose different perspectives on causes and consequences. Narrative inquiry that analyzes how stories are produced and utilized can enable a more nuanced approach to complex social problems. We conducted 19 individual, in-depth, and semistructured interviews with young mothers ages 16 to 21 who attend a community-based alternative education program in a low-income northeastern city. Interviews were analyzed using thematic narrative techniques. The young mothers we interviewed used a process of strategic negotiation to distance themselves from prevailing social and cultural stories about the problem of teen motherhood. Participants demonstrated this strategic process through their attempts to assuage stigma and construct unproblematic identities. Young mothers reproduced and reinterpreted a variety of circulating narratives on teen childbearing. They reproduced dominant narratives through pathology, missed adolescence, and redemption stories, and reinterpreted dominant narratives through stories of stratified reproduction, sexual health education, and stigmatization and surveillance. Our participants' narratives illustrate the need to think broadly about the meanings of early pregnancy and motherhood in terms of how they play out in research and policymaking. We call for a discursive shift in ways of knowing about and doing research and policy surrounding teen childbearing.

The field of public health frequently issues calls for social justice, but it is not clear that everyone agrees on what this means or how to achieve it. To assess lay citizens' views on the relationship between justice and health, we conducted individual interviews with 19 young parenting women to hear and discuss their thoughts about the causes of health disparities, ways to reduce them, and the nature of the just society. A salient theme to emerge in these interviews was the topic of “caring.” This article reports on four categories identified under the theme of caring: 1) observations of apathy and indifference; 2) the effects of not caring; 3) models of caring; and 4) the pull of caring. Based on these results, the article outlines a grounded theory on the role of caring in conceptualizing health motivation.

Comprehensive sexuality education curricula that incorporate sex positive and integrated approaches go beyond a presentation of facts and strategies for prevention to emphasize the promotion of sexual subjectivity and wellbeing. A pilot sensual sexuality education program was planned, implemented and informally evaluated with young parenting women at an alternative General Educational Development test preparation center. The program prioritized a sex positive framework, including topics such as pleasure, desire and sexual entitlement, and invited participants to explore sexuality through a multisensory orientation. Participants took part in small group discussions and activities that engaged their senses through arts-based methods. Grounded in holism, program topics were integrated with a focus on participants' everyday experiences. The pilot curriculum serves as a promising program for re-positioning young parenting women as sexual subjects, which is key to the promotion of health and wellbeing.

Background Young Latinas living in the United States experience inordinate sexual and reproductive health outcome disparities. However, though prioritized as subjects for prevention, they are also often denied sexual agency. Purpose This article reports the results of a study conducted to examine young Latino/a participants' perspectives on communicating and learning about sexuality in school and family settings. Methods A Photovoice project was conducted with 20 Latino/a high school students. Each participant received a digital camera to take photos for 2 discussion sessions. Participants discussed select photos in relation to self-generated topics. Results One overarching theme, double standards in expectations about sexual communication, and 2 related subthemes, contrasting gender expectations in sexual desire and pleasure and confirming ideologies in sexual taboos and disconnections, emerged during discussions. Discussion The persistence of a double standard placing responsibility for sexual protectio...

This collection of original articles, a companion to the authors' Participatory Visual and Digital Methods, illustrates how innovative visual and digital research techniques are being used in various field projects in health care, environmental policy, urban planning, education and youth development, and heritage management settings. These methodologies produce rich visual and narrative data guided by participant interests and priorities, key tools for collaborative work. The 16 chapters-include digital storytelling, PhotoVoice, community-based filmmaking, participatory mapping and GIS, and participatory digital archival research;-provide a portfolio of model research projects for researchers who wish to collaborate on community-based studies;-will appeal to an audience across social science, heritage, health, education, and social service fields.An open-access companion website will allow readers to view the research products presented in each contributor's chapter.

Digital storytelling (DST) engages participants in a group-based process to create and share narrative accounts of life events. We present key evaluation findings of a 2-year, mixed-methods study that focused on effects of participating in the DST process on young Puerto Rican Latina’s self-esteem, social support, empowerment, and sexual attitudes and behaviors. Quantitative results did not show significant changes in the expected outcomes. However, in our qualitative findings we identified several ways in which the DST made positive, health-bearing effects. We argue for the importance of “measuring down” to reflect the locally grounded, felt experiences of participants who engage in the process, as current quantitative scales do not “measure up” to accurately capture these effects. We end by suggesting the need to develop mixed-methods, culturally relevant, and sensitive evaluation tools that prioritize process effects as they inform intervention and health promotion.

Predominant approaches to teen pregnancy focus on decreasing numbers of teen mothers, babies born to them, and state dollars spent to support their families. This overshadows the structural violence interwoven into daily existence for these young parents. This paper argues for the increased use of participatory visual methods to compliment traditional research methods in shifting notions of what counts as evidence in response to teen pregnancy and parenting. We present the methods and results from a body mapping workshop as part of 'Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice', a project that examines structural barriers faced by young parenting Latinas and seeks to develop relevant messaging and programming to support and engage youth. Body mapping, as an engaging, innovative participatory visual methodology, involves young parenting women and other marginalised populations in drawing out a deeper understanding of sexual health inequities. Our findings highlight the ways body mapping elicits bodies as evidence to understand young motherhood and wellbeing.

This chapter discusses a digital storytelling project that combined aims to gain fine-grained understanding of, and address, sexual health inequities among Puerto Rican Latinas in the project community. The authors begin by introducing digital storytelling as a culture-centered approach for use in public health research and intervention. They then trace two emerging ethical issues in research using digital storytelling, both related to key project findings of current and historical trauma among participants: (1) conflicting aims in the project and (2) the ethical standard to minimize harm. The authors conclude that these issues can be resolved if projects are guided by a sensitive ethical protocol, and that digital storytelling and other participatory, visual, and arts-based methods can be harnessed for the design of effective sexual health interventions.

To better understand how young Alaska Native (Inupiaq) people are creatively responding to the tensions of growing up in a world markedly different from that of their parents and grandparents, the pilot study examined youth-produced digital stories as representations of their everyday lives, values, and identities. Two hundred and seventy-one youth–produced digital stories were examined and assigned descriptive attributes; of these, 31 stories were selected and subjected to a more rigorous coding and a thematic analysis. Findings fall into three main categories: self-representation, sites of achievement, and relationships. Participants’ digital stories overwhelmingly depicted positive self-images that included both codified cultural values and pop cultural images to construct novel forms of cultural identity. The gendered depictions of achievement signal a need for more varied, valued, and accessible avenues for success for boys. Lastly, relationships were prominent in the stories, but there was an absence of young adult role models, particularly men, in the stories.

Influenced by Cooke and Kothari's (2001) suggestion that participation "remains a way of talking about rather than doing things" (p. 32), we question to what extent this is true in the public health funding process. Thus, the aim of this article was to investigate the ways in which recent National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded community-based participatory research (CBPR) projects discursively positioned CBPR in their grant applications. We collected 17 NIH-funded CBPR proposals, analyzed them using a grounded theory approach, and subjected the findings to critical analysis focusing on the definition of community, the type of community "participation" promoted, and the nature of the research proposed. We conclude that certain types of CBPR projects are privileged in the funding review process and discuss the implications of these findings for future CBPR praxis.

For young women, being “aggressive” is generally viewed as a negative identity and associated with bullying and interpersonal violence. Especially in a heteronormative context, sexually aggressive identities are not commonly associated with young women. Resulting negative perceptions or silences surrounding this possible sexual identity are directly consequential in the development of comprehensive sexuality education curricula. Taking a narrative approach and applying a Photovoice elicitation strategy to prompt discussion, the data presented in this article show how young Latinas, when given the opportunity, critically construct aggressive identities in contrastive terms, affirming the identity to befit a counter-intuitive understanding. Implications of considering subjective complexities in sexuality education curricula are discussed in the conclusion.

Few studies have explored women’s subjective experiences with Depo-Provera, in particular its impact on their sexual selves and everyday lives. Thirty-four (34) women were interviewed about their experiences using Depo-Provera and other methods of contraception, with interviews analyzed using a thematic narrative analysis approach. A key theme emerging in interviews was decrease in libido (sexual desire) in taking Depo-Provera, which was linked with emotions, body image, and had social ramifications. Four participants’ stories serve as exemplars for exploring subjective complexity. "Lived" accounts of user experiences are essential for overcoming a reductive focus on contraceptive side effects, which elides connections and obscures user understanding. A narrative perspective provides an empirical basis for developing family planning programs and sexual health policies that acknowledge more experientially grounded conceptualizations of women's sexual and reproductive health and wellbeing.

Technology…is not simply an adjunct to business-as-usual; it becomes a defining quality of our culture as researchers. As such, we might do well to devote more of our energies to studying ourselves as we study others (Tedlock 2005). In other words, we need to turn our observational skills on the encounters we ourselves create; we must observe not only what happens when "we" encounter "them," but also what happens to us when we mediate those encounters via a particular kind of technology that has the capacity to transform both our way of seeing and our way of understanding the world (Angrosino 2007:119).

Aline Gubrium, a young White woman teaching Introduction To Comparative Women's Studies at a historically Black women's college, and Tjazha Mazhani, a young Black woman who has taken Gubrium's course, enact a play—about their multiple positions and perspectives (in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, age, and rank) in the pedagogical process of teaching about forms of power and oppression. Black feminist Audre Lorde's work, which was taught and read in the course, resonates throughout, providing both direction and inspiration for the developing dialogue.

Anthropologist Lila Abu Lughod's idea of “writing against culture” is the point of departure for deconstructing the image of the monstrous mother dominating portrayals of African American women who use crack cocaine. Aiming to “unsettle” the cultural stereotypes, this article presents the narrative of an African American woman who has used crack, illustrating how elements of Twelve-Step recovery discourse and Afrocentric spirituality differentially frame her story. The case shows that recovery and spirituality are as much narrative resources as they are narrative imperatives. Rather than simply reproducing either of these resources in her story, she alternatively constructs herself as a recovering addict on one hand, and a spiritually strong woman on the other, exemplifying how narrative obviates stereotypic representations.