Healthy Disruptions: Series Premiere

Welcome to the first episode of the Healthy Disruptions Podcast, a series about the COVID-19 pandemic. Join us as we reflect on the changes, issues, and sources of strength for the people of Southern California during the pandemic. In this first episode we will hear from our project leads and showcase this season’s episodes. We also give some reasons why you’ll want to tune in.

Hosts include Amy Dao, Juliet McMullin, Joshua Liashenko and Sahar Foruzan and Alejandro Echeverria as part of the production team. 

Transcript

Healthy Disruptions Podcast – Episode 1 Transcript

[music intro]

Welcome to Healthy Disruptions - a podcast about health and community in southern CA. 

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We’re a group of researchers, students, professors and community members interested in what makes society healthy. Our title Healthy Disruptions, comes from our hope that upheaval can lead to a more just, inclusive and healthy society. Healthy Disruptions is a truly collaborative effort. Therefore, each episode will be hosted by different members of the research team. 

I’m Dr. Amy Dao. I’m an anthropologist, an assistant professor in the department of geography and anthropology at Cal Poly Pomona, and I’ll be your host for this first episode. 

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This season, we'll be sharing stories from our project called Narrating the Pandemic: collective reflections through the disruption. While the numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths told us what was happening at the beginning of the pandemic, they did not capture the experience around of the pandemic or how community groups have responded where institutions have faltered. We started gathering stories across Southern California about how residents were surviving through the early part of the COVID19 pandemic. Now we want to share these with you. 

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We’re now over two years into the pandemic, so you might be wondering, why would I want to listen to this podcast? Haven’t we heard enough about COVID19? We have a vaccine, mask mandates have been lifted, aren’t we back to normal? Well in today’s episode we want to share with you two reasons why you’ll want to tune in. To help us explain, we’ll be hearing from some special guests: 

First, we’re talking to the leads of the project, Dr. Juliet McMullin, Professor, Director, and Endowed Chair of the Medical Humanities and Arts in the School of Medicine at UC Irvine and Dr. Joshua Liashenko, Postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Social Medicine, Population and Public Health at UC Riverside.

Amy: 

Hi, Juliet and Joshua. 

Juliet: 

Hi, Amy. 

Joshua: 

Hi, Amy. 

Amy: 

How y'all doing?

Joshua:

Good. Thanks. How are you?

Amy:    

Doing good, doing good. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Juliet:

Absolutely. Happy to be here.

Amy:

So I'm wondering, could you tell us a little bit about the project and why people should listen to our podcasts.

Juliet: 

You know, the pandemic, just, I don't want to say it just happened upon us, because there were so many signs. But, you know, as an academic, and in teaching classes, all of a sudden, one day, you know, we were told March 17, 2020, you need to go home. And, you know, it just it was an upheaval in so many ways. And then the next quarter started. So we were at the end of one quarter and heading into the second quarter. And I was teaching a small class introduction to medical humanities with our medical students. And we had this amazing conversation that was inspired by our professor Dana Simmons in history, where we had them write about how they got the pandemic, or how they knew the pandemic was starting, you know, how did they come into it? And you know, some of them wrote about how, as they were Asian, all the sudden, patients wouldn't want to see them wouldn't want them in the room. Another was just realizing that she couldn't go to the coffee shop that she used to normally go to to study. And so there was this huge variation in the way that people were even entering into the pandemic. There is all sorts of questions, you know, what are our experiences? What are the contexts what are we seeing and overlooking. And then I was listening to the episode of Kimberle Crenshaw, Under the Black Light podcast, which before and now after is the Intersectionality Matters podcast. And this was early in the pandemic, and she was having panels of experts, activists come and talk about what was happening on the ground, and really calling attention to the disparities. And one of the speakers had mentioned that there was little to no data being collected and reporting on the stories of the people who were facing significant structural challenges with their jobs with childcare with the illness. And the, you know, the passion and the need to have this information was so clear, because that's the way that we erase disparities. That's the way that we, if we don't hear the stories, we get to ignore what's going on. And so I thought, well, we're anthropologists, this is what we do, that we should be engaged in this and these are-- this is the kind of information that anthropologists have always gathered. You know what is going on in the daily lives of people in their ordinary lives in and how? How do we let that go unnoticed? How do we let the disproportionate deaths of so many people who are effective, affected go unnoticed? And, you know, we just so it's sort of this commitment, disciplinary commitment, but a bigger commitment to the communities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties and the other areas that we talked to, it's a commitment to make sure that their stories are heard the details of their stories, and so that we can connect and relate to both our humanity and the bigger structural questions of the disparities that were observed during the pandemic.

Amy:

Thank you so much. Joshua, did you want to add anything?

Joshua:

Yes, I would love to add more details when you start over? Yes, I would love to add more to what Julia just said, especially regarding the attention that we were giving to people stories across southern California, especially in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. I think that it meant a lot to many of our participants that they were being asked, specifically them just regular people in the community, about their experiences about their stories. I think it really helped them understand that they they matter that their experiences during this tumultuous time, need to be recorded. And frankly, I think it was very cathartic for many of our participants. So I really think that one good reason to listen to our podcast is that our study enabled participants to share their stories in real time we started this project, the very beginning of the pandemic. And the our participants used the interviews, to reflect on their experiences and those early days, and to reflect on how their lives were changing. Again, because of how recent the start of the pandemic was compared to when we started the project. And of course, the lock downs and the stay at home orders the mask mandates. Some participants realize the full extent of their feelings and emotions for the first time during the interviews. So to be able to hear their strain strange voices, and sometimes the emotion come through because all of a sudden, for the first time being asked how do you feel they were in that moment having to then deal with their feelings. And it was shocking, and, and it was sometimes uncomfortable for them. Because the gravity of how all of our lives were changing, was right in their face, and they were having to talk about it. We were able to trace changes and how people understand their lived experiences at the moment, they were facing the reality of their current situation, we had to think about how to ethically and with the utmost care, ask people to tell us about their lives, and how they were suffering. So making sure that while we were collecting data, we were also caring for the people that were so gracious and gracious enough to share their stories with us.

Amy: 

Absolutely. And how were you able to do that? I mean, given that this was the beginning of the pandemic, and as anthropologists, we're just so used to being physically there, right as, as researchers and as people, human beings connecting to other human beings. How are you able to ethically move forward? Collect these stories while working in a virtual space?

Joshua:

That's a really great question. And that was a question that was foremost in our minds as we are designing this project and in going through all of the potential ethical conundrums that we would have to face while collecting this data. And in engaging the community in this way. So one of the challenges that we faced from drawing up the research designs how to manage this type of intimate information, while considering the difficulty of maintaining the confidentiality of participants, plus questions arose concerning the quality of data that we were collecting, when study participants were often living in the same home as the researchers, or at least connected to the researchers that were out there collecting data personally in some way. 

Juliet: 

We didn't just think about it and say, Okay, it's done. Right. We had to go back and forth, and back and forth to really think about those ethical questions.

Joshua: 

And it really was a team effort and everyone that was involved in the early planning stages of we had a large meeting, and we started to create different questions or potential interview questions that we wanted to ask the community. And so we broke up into groups over zoom in breakout rooms, and talked about the different themes that we would want to highlight through the interviews. And there was a little bit of back and forth regarding what was going to be considered most pertinent. When we were thinking about, especially like the economic toll of, of the pandemic, and people's livelihoods, their jobs, educational resources, especially with schools being closed down. We were thinking about mental health, accessing the basics of survival. The experiences of essential workers are all of those themes are so important to us. But yeah, back to what you're saying. We had to retool a little bit of our traditional like ethnographic methodological toolkit, we had to change up how we traditionally approach conducting interviews, given that we were stuck at home. And that's when we decided to really focus on you know, our personal connections, whether it would be with people within our home or people that you are connected to your family or friends. 

Juliet: 

No, I think it's so it was one of the key ways that we could really imagine connecting with the community, right, starting with people that we know, that were willing to share with us and then branching out from there. And, and those are, so many of us know, and are with people who had been so adversely affected in the pandemic, both in their with their labor as well as their health and to decide in this moment that we were as much part of the community as anyone else. And so, you know, sometimes you don't insert yourself that way. But this was a moment where we really felt that it was important to have that kind of inclusion.

Joshua:

I think also how recent theater element of the Center for Health Disparities Research was before the pandemic, also serve as a source of, of inspiration. You know, because there was this wonderful center that was intended to be, you know, focusing a lot of especially within the community engagement, dissemination core, to be focusing on being out in the community, but we could literally not be out in the community in a physical sense. So, by crafting a project like this, we were still able to hold on to our mandate.

Juliet:

Exactly, yeah, the center was barely eight months old. At that point, and, you know, establishing some of us had established relationships, but we were still establishing more relationships. So yeah, it did absolutely connect us in ways that I don't think we would have connected otherwise.

Amy:

I think it's great that you both mentioned that, you know, this project is a project that, you know, everyone involved in it is part of the community, because we were all going through this. And it's a different way of doing anthropology, I think, then an anthropology that is extractive. And that's something that we definitely wanted to avoid. And the fact that we are sort of, you know, collecting stories from people who we love and care about, and who wants to share these stories with us, what do you think that demonstrates?

Joshua:

I think that it means that we're responsive to communities. And I think in the legacy of anthropology, we've gained this reputation of not necessarily being responsive, but like you said, Being extractive. And so this type of work allowed us to not only take from communities but to also be productive and work with communities. You know, the trauma of the pandemic, and people who, who were losing everything, but also people who were being lost themselves. And the toll that that covenant was having. Being able to provide mental health resources for our participants, which we made available to anyone who requested them or desired to have them that agreed to be interviewed, we made sure that we were we had resources for them. And like I said, before, you know, this is the first time many people were able to, to hash out their emotions in real time. And, and of course, we're not therapists, but you know, being able to be humans to other humans, and to bring that humanity into the research context, I think is extraordinarily powerful.

Juliet:

Yeah, and that opportunity for people to work through their stories, right, because that's how we make meaning is by talking to each other and sharing our stories with each other. And so yeah, in a moment when everything has was so disrupted it was an opportunity to recognize the humanity in each other and make meaning of what was happening. Joan Didion we tell stories so that we might live.

Amy:

That’s a great quote to end things on. Thank you so much for sharing these insights. 

Amy:

To sum up what Juliet and Joshua said, two reasons to listen to the Healthy Disruptions podcast are 1) to hear people reflect on their pandemic experience as they were living through its beginnings and 2) to listen to the stories of those living primarily in Inland southern California who are experiencing health disparities.

For our third reason, we’re going to hear from Dr. Kim Yi Dionne, Associate Professor in the Department of Political science at UC Riverside. 

Kim Yi Dionne: 

I'm really excited to hear the covert narratives. I've been really practicing what I preach. I have been isolating and maintaining my distance from people, and I'm grateful for this time now where we're reentering interactions with people, though, it's somewhat mediated by things like Zoom, and it's nice reconnecting to people in person. I feel like the pandemic has been so hard on so many people that they don't want to talk about it anymore that they want to move on from it. And so I'm really looking forward, actually, to hearing this podcast and hearing what people have to say about it, because I think that even if we're not immediately having a conversation about it, there's this memorializing that's happening here in the show. Right. That this kind of collecting people stories gives it the weight and important it deserves and requires us to stop and think about what's happened. And I think that that's good and healthy, and we need that. And maybe we'll also see ourselves and our own stories reflected in those narratives. So thank you so much for collecting them.

Amy:

As Kim said, our third reason is to remember. In each episode, you’ll hear the voices of our community, our research team, and experts as they describe and reflect on the early experience of the pandemic. 

Subscribe to our podcast, and each month we will bring you stories about:

The politics of the pandemic - “So the thing is I don’t know when, I wish I could pinpoint when but I don’t know when this went from being and public health and safety issue to being a political one”

Changes in family dynamics - “It’s just kind of odd to make kids sit in front of a computer for 4 or 5 hours and expect to sit down and stare and then we think about the health implications” 

Basic needs - “…right when they announced the lockdown, it was actually really really busy in the grocery stores it was kind of like seeing an apocalypse happen. A lot of people kept asking where the alcohol was, where the wet wipes were, hand sanitizer… “

Mental health - “The general state of mental health during the pandemic is very polarized…a lot of people are experiencing depression, anxiety, thoughts of loneliness. They’re experiencing a lot of these feelings for the very first time which is also scary and new…”

And Silver linings and sources of strength  - “Prayer prayer, it is just praying. Praying and simply asking god–asking god to calm this thing that is happening” 

Episode Outro

[outro music] 5-10 sec fade to thanks 

Amy: 

Thank you for listening to Healthy Disruptions. Our episode today was produced by Alejandro Echeverria, Sahar Foruzan, and myself Amy Dao. Thanks to Vince Parra from BelzarMusic for the intro and outro music. 

This podcast was produced by the Center for Health Disparities Research at the University of California, Riverside in collaboration with HARC- the Health Assessment and Research for Communities team and the researchers from the anthropology departments at Cal Poly Pomona and UC Riverside.  

Content was developed by our research team in collaboration with loved ones, friends and neighbors. The podcast is funded by a grant from the University of California Humanities Research Institute and The College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UC Riverside. 

To learn more about our work, visit us at healthydisruptions.buzzsprout.com and to be part of conversations about this podcast you can follow the hashtag #HDpodcast.

We’ll see you next time for some more Healthy Disruptions.” 

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