Elizabeth Hoover is an anthropologist and associate professor of environmental science, policy and management at Berkley, who long claimed to be native (receiving grants and research access under this assumption) but has recently admitted otherwise. She has a PhD in anthropology from Brown University with a focus on Environmental and critical Medical Anthropology.
Katsi Cook, Mother’s Milk Project, collecting samples of breast milk: “Katsi has described this work as “barefoot epidemiology,” with Indigenous women developing their own research projects based on community concerns and then collecting their own data.” (90) - 61? – used a private lab to analyze samples because women did not trust the New York State Health Department
“Barefoot epidemiology” is a concept borrowed from China’s “barefoot doctors”—community-level health workers who brought basic care to China’s countryside in the mid-twentieth century. Hipgrave, “Communicable Disease Control.” According to a “workers’ manual” published by the International Labour Organization, barefoot research is often qualitative, and qualitative research is not the standard approach for conducting health studies, which tend to be based on laboratory experiments and clinical findings. See Keith et al., Barefoot Research” (294)
Civic Dislocation: “In many instances Mohawks experienced what Sheila Jasanoff calls “civic dislocation,” which she defines as a mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public, and what they did in reality. In the dislocated state, trust in government vanished and people looked to other institutions . . . for information and advice to restore their security. It was as if the gears of democracy had spun loose, causing citizens, at least temporarily, to disengage from the state” (118)
“Dennis Wiedman describes these negative sociocultural changes and structures of disempowerment as “chronicities of modernity,” which produce everyday behaviors that limit physical activities while promoting high caloric intake and psychosocial stress” (235)
Third space of sovereignty: “This tension that arises when community members challenge political bodies while simultaneously demanding that they address the issues of the community has been theorized by political scientist Kevin Bruyneel, who describes how for centuries Indigenous political actors have demanded rights and resources from the American settler state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives. He calls this resistance a “third space of sovereignty” that resides neither inside nor outside the American political system, but exists on the very boundaries of that system.” (259)
“Akwesasne residents’ main criticism of the Mount Sinai study was that at its conclusion, the researchers packed up and left, and community members felt they had not received any useful information.” (76)
“As scholars of tribal health risk evaluation Stuart Harris and Barbara Harper explain, among most tribal people, individual and collective well-being comes from being part of a healthy community with access to heritage resources and ancestral lands, which allow community members to satisfy the personal responsibilities of participating in traditional activities and providing for their families.” (96)
“By placing “race/ethnicity” on a list of diabetes causes without qualifying why it is there, the CDC neglects the underlying root cause—that race/ethnicity is often associated also with class, education, levels of stress, and access to health care and fresh foods.” (231)
“Chaufan argues that to counter the focus on the medicalized aspects of diabetes, which has led to the individualization and depoliticization of the issue, a political ecology framework needs to be applied to the disease, one that is concerned with the social, economic, and political institutions of the human environments where diabetes is emerging.39 Such a framework would highlight how diabetes rates among Mohawk people are influenced more by changes in the natural environment and home environments than by genetic makeup.” (231 - 232)
“Understanding community conceptions of this intertwined “social and biological history” is important because, as Juliet McMullin notes, examining the intersections of health, identity, family, and the environment helps to “denaturalize biomedical definitions of health and moves us toward including knowledge that is based on a shared history of sovereignty, capitalist encounters, resistance, and integrated innovation.”61 The inclusion of this knowledge can lead to the crafting of interventions that community members see as addressing the root causes of their health conditions and promoting better health.” (249)
Hoover’s book is an analysis of the material and psychosocial effects of industrial pollution along the St. Lawrence River, which runs through the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. Hoover focuses on resistance to private and state efforts at land enclosures and economic rearrangements. Hoover shows how legacy of industrialization and pollution (GM and Alocoa, primarily) ruptured Mohawk relationships with the river, and incurred on tribal sovereignty by disturbing the ability to safely farm, garden, raise livestock, gather, and recreate in ways fostered important connections between and amongst people and the land (“ecocultural relationships”). Hoover describes how confusion about risk and exposure is culturally produced and develops the "Three Bodies" analytic framework to show how individual, social and political bodies are entangled in the process of social and biophysical suffering.
Hoover also highlights how in response to pollution, Mohawk projects of resistance emerged - a newspaper, documentary films, and community-based health impacts research. Hoover conducts a comparative history of two research projects tracking the effects on industrial-chemical contamination on Akwesasne people and wildlife: the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s epidemiological study in the 1980s, which failed to engage Akwesasne people in the production of knowledge or share results meaningfully, and the SUNY-Albany School of Public Health Superfund Basic Research Program study (in the 1990s and 200s), which ultimately began incorporating key theoretical and methodological principles of CBPR.
This study utilized a random sample of rape victim advocates to determine whether the current community systems and services work for these victims. As is mentioned in the introduction, the services for rape victims are typically separated in terms of legal, medical, mental health; studies tend to focus on these entities individually when evaluating their procedures, thus greatly narrowing the scope of the procedure. This study, therefore, aims to create a comprehensive view of the system as a whole and whether services provided to victims work in this larger context.
The study does utilize a fairly new perspective to gather information. This study as a whole appears to work both as a review article and present information gathered through the subjects interviewed. The first portion of the article presents the various factors being considered in the provided services (for example, why some rape cases are thrown out at a community level, and what characteristics of sexual assault influence social system response). The second portion utilizes interviews with a national, random sample of victim advocates. The selection process ended with 177 eligible agencies for questioning, and 168 participated in the interview process. As mentioned in the introduction of the report and in a previous answer, this large scale study is contrary to usual methodologies. Victim services are typically examined within a small context (i.e. how many alleged rape cases brought to a detective are pursued or how many alleged rape victims who present for counseling receive this help and what is their progress). This study took all of the levels of service (legal, medical, and mental health) and viewed their effectiveness as a network.
This study was published in 1998 in the American Journal of Community Psychology. It is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on research devoted to community psychology. Community psychology attempts to place an individual's context within communities/community structure and in society. This includes quality of life for certain individuals, populations, and communities. The impact factor is only about 2, indicating that the journal is infrequently cited and does not have the prowess of larger journal publications.
According to PubMed, this article has been cited 217 times since its publication in 1998. It has appeared as a reference work for research in areas such as PTSD, secondary victimization, silencing of victims, and emotional engagement of researching rape/traumatic events. The list of citing articles seems to commonly focus on the themes of community impact on rape victims, suggesting that this article did spark at least several additional studies.
As the data is from 1998, I would sincerely hope that the data has already encouraged responses. Nonetheless, at the very least, the data should be able to serve as a marker for progression in traumatic event services. While sexual assault is markedly different from other traumatic events, the data could also be extrapolated to other events with community ties. More pointedly, data from this study demonstrated where some of the gaps came between victims with the "best" service outcomes and those with the "worst". The primary difference between the "best" group and those in latter tears was in the legal system. These shortcomings appeared to emerge early on, with a discrepancy in whether their reports even made it to the desk of the prosecution from the police department. This indicates a shortcoming in the system, and a point which should be investigated to better victim outcomes moving forward. Sexual assault cases are rarely black and white, thus some detectives may be inclined to create personal judgments about the merit of a case before passing it along, thus leading to its exclusion. This is one of several differences in victim encounters leading to less desired outcomes.