Devon Payne-Sturges
Environmental Heath Inequities
Uncovering the root causes of environmental health disparities nationally and globally
Like much of environmental health sciences research on environmental justice, my thinking about environmental injustice and health inequities has evolved. It is not enough to continually document racial differences without critically examining the social mechanisms that create these inequities in the first place.
Additionally, to better address environmental health equities, it is also important to scrutinize how social differences (e.g., race-based differences) are conceptualized and measured in epidemiological studies. This has led me to engage more with literature outside of environmental health sciences, including literature from the humanities and other scholarly traditions such as decolonial theories, Black Feminism, and causal structures theories. As a result, I prioritize research that helps to uncover the root causes of environmental health disparities in the United States and globally.
Photo: Alisha Camacho/RESPIRAR
The RESPIRAR Project
I am advancing approaches for measuring and interrogating structural racism’s impact on human health through my interdisciplinary, community-based project on the health and housing conditions of migrant and seasonal farmworker.
RESPIRAR is a 5-year project funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences that seeks to unpack the mechanisms through which institutional policies, regulatory responses and practices, both historic and contemporary, shape respiratory health trends among Black and Latino migrant seasonal farmworkers. We also aim to inform the design of policies and best practices for optimizing the living and working conditions and better health protections among these workers.
Our project advances an innovative combination of environmental exposure analysis, longitudinal legal analysis, and community-based system dynamics research methods. The multidisciplinary team convenes academic researchers in environmental health sciences, anthropology, biostatistics, system dynamics, and occupational health law while working in partnership with el Comité de Apoyo a Los Trabajadores Agrícolas (CATA- the Farmworker Support Committee).
A Global Lens
We often assume that the health inequities we observe in the United States are unique to our society and are intractable.
However, as documented by the World Health Organization initiative on the social determinants of health, there are common drivers of health disparities across countries, including poverty, racial discrimination, marginalization, and environmental damage.
These conditions arise as a result of economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms and political systems. By engaging in international collaboration to address the social determinants of environmental health from the context of health equity we can foster coalition-building to find more promising solutions.
EXPLORE PAST PROJECTS
