ASB Programs!

The buildings we live in, the roads and sidewalks we use to get from place to place, and the distribution networks that provide us with electricity and water all make up our built environment. Yet not all built environments are built alike: race, and socioeconomic status often determine the quality of one’s environment. An abundance of research has unveiled the striking impact infrastructure has on quality of life. Logically, then, inequities in built environments are reflected in health disparities that predominantly affect low-income BIPOC communities. Our program is centered around the intersection of the built environment and health outcomes. We will consider how proximity to hazardous waste sites, access to green spaces and transportation, and quality of housing intersect with patterns in community health. We will then examine how urban planning can be approached with a framework underscoring sustainability and the social determinants of health to support healthy built environments. We will begin by engaging with Houston grassroots organizers, policy makers, and scholars to understand how historic inequities in Houston’s urban infrastructure have manifested into a public health issue. After developing an understanding of our local built environment, we will travel to New Orleans to further understand how corporate accountability, natural disaster recovery, and grassroots responses create lasting impacts on community health. Through this ASB, we hope to gain a thorough understanding of how to utilize existing urban design methods to improve the well-being of our communities, and to use this knowledge to become effective advocates at Rice and beyond.

While the public health focus has primarily been on understanding the effect of COVID-19 on our physical health, few studies and legislative queries have looked into the long-term impact of the ongoing pandemic on the mental wellbeing of critical populations such as racial and ethnic minorities (REM). Furthermore, with the pandemic came a rise of racialized tension and an exacerbation of pre-existing stigmas. To investigate how COVID-19 has impacted REM, we must look at how racism and capitalism work in tandem to produce inequalities across society that are particularly salient at the intersection of mental and physical health during the pandemic. In collaboration with health equity-focused advocacy and service organizations such as the Healthcare for Homeless and Harris County Public Health, we aim to understand the context for long-standing and nascent issues in a capitalistic society that continues to exploit REM. Participants will then undergo training in specialized skills such as Mental Health First Aid with the Rice Wellbeing Center in preparation to engage in critical service in the Houston area with community partners such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Moreover, through community-engaged learning and advocacy training from organizations such as the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), we hope to conduct advocacy and activism in Austin to further mental health accessibility legislation currently being pursued by our partners. We hope that through an intersectional and diverse experience, participants learn how to view mental health as public health and gain a well-rounded skill set of civic practices to affect change in their communities.

One of the biggest challenges in administering palliative care lies in communication barriers between the patient and physician. Palliative care revolves around understanding the patient narrative, and as such, is difficult to standardize when each patient has unique ways of expressing pain and suffering and different perspectives on dying. Consequently, end-of-life care can differ between demographics. Through this ASB, we will explore how both the quality and accessibility to this healthcare differs in racial minorities and cognitively-impaired patients, who experience limited access to and poorer quality of palliative care. By working alongside local organizations, we hope to better understand the patient’s narrative, where and how disparities arise, and how we can advocate with these patients. This is also a timely topic because COVID-19 has amplified the issue of death, suffering, and long hospital stays for a large and varied population this past year. Through this ASB, participants will become more comfortable with discussing difficult topics such as pain, suffering, and end-of-life treatment plans. By having conversations on such sensitive topics, this experience will foster empathy and prepare participants for the difficult conversations that arise in the healthcare industry.

When conducting clinical trials, biomedical researchers often make the assumption that the average human body is that of the cisgender, straight, able-bodied man. Biomedical research has traditionally lacked at properly including women and queer individuals, creating a data infrastructure that fails to account for the biological differences between the genders. The skewed conclusions from these research studies perpetuate the health disparities faced by these populations, such as lack of proper reproductive care, high maternal mortality rates, and disproportionate prevalence of mental illnesses. We will explore this issue through a curriculum that covers gender theory, moves into infrastructure and societal systems (such as the way experimental research data is collected and analyzed), and trickles down into everyday lives (such as disparities in clinical experiences and social inequality). We will engage with community partners that work at the forefront of this issue, whether by addressing research gaps, advocating for women and LGBTQ+ rights, or by treating vulnerable populations directly. We believe that it is only by recognizing how gender scripts and cisnormativity function locally and within our own lives that we can find personal agency. This is the first step in constructing a better data infrastructure that accounts for the diversity of the gendered human experience. Participants will leave this ASB with a better awareness of how gender blindness and the institutional erasure of women and queer individuals lead to a skewed, cis-male-leaning perception of what it means to be human.

There is a great need for spaces and services for refugees worldwide as they navigate resettlement following war and violence. However, services to support refugees are often either inaccessible or do not exist due to various structural barriers. Refugee communities often experience exclusion from healthcare services, arising from lack of financial infrastructure, complexity of the healthcare system, and cultural barriers such as issues with language and trust. Many of these issues have also been magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic.

After California, Texas resettles the most refugees each year. In 2016, Houston received around 3,000 refugees, originating from countries including Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Iraq. As such, Houston must confront how to provide spaces and resources for refugees to access quality healthcare. Our trip will focus on refugee lived experiences to examine how systemic and sociocultural barriers interact with each other to inhibit healthcare access. In particular, we will discuss financial exclusion, navigating the healthcare and insurance systems, language and communication, trust in providers, and women’s health and gender-based violence. By interacting with hospitals and policy experts, refugee services and resettlement agencies, and advocacy organizations, we hope to explore how structural forces impact the individual experiences, choices, and knowledge that refugees have with accessing healthcare following resettlement. Ultimately, we seek to empower students to learn about the principles of ethical service and sustainable advocacy, the concept of intersectionality, and the confidence to apply these concepts in issues outside of this particular social issue.

Global health technologies is lauded as an objective field with a unique human component, as it is the science of bettering lives. Yet we often forget the subjective side to medicine and ignore the biases that are baked into the field. These biases are propagated because of vestiges of colonialism, discrimination in medical device design, and a lack of pressure from regulatory agencies and financial bodies to address these biases. Pulse oximetry devices, for instance, are essential tools to monitor blood oxygenation levels; however, they have racial biases that result in inaccurate readings in darker-skinned individuals as they are calibrated for lighter skin tones. A failure to consider how health complications manifest differently within different ethnic and racial populations have resulted in the design and approval of technologies that do not cater to marginalized populations. While technology has bettered the lives of many, we have a responsibility to make medical device design more fair and equitable. Looking at both the larger governmental entities controlling the approval of these devices, as well as smaller POC-owned companies trying to create new culturally competent technologies would provide a way to break down and digest the myriad of inequities in medical devices. Throughout the ASB, we will partner with global health organizations like the Rice 360 Institute for Global Health. Looking at these contributors would both encompass examining the technology and their biases as well as the agencies that control how medical devices are regulated.

In the United States, and Texas in particular, reproductive rights are under attack. Governor Abbott’s abortion bill bans abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many people know that they are pregnant. Access to reproductive rights are heavily politicized and framed from a moral or religious standpoint rather than from a health or human-rights framework. Many denominations of Christianity broadly stigmatize reproductive justice because of its association with abortion and implications of pre-marital sex. These religious ideologies may cause women and transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people to avoid healthcare options or carry out dangerous pregnancies for fear of ostracization from their communities or other risks. We realize the importance of reproductive justice and hope to develop a more nuanced understanding of how religious ideologies inform reproductive health decision-making and access to reproductive health. We hope to explore ways for religious institutions and reproductive justice advocates to move forward together. Many initiatives of Christian organizations have used their faith to fight for reproductive rights. We plan to partner with organizations located in Southern and predominantly Christian areas that have experience navigating opposing attitudes in their communities. We also hope that our participants' viewpoints are challenged and that they are able to learn how to defend their support for reproductive justice to those who may not agree.