Kearney 2024 Memorial Lecture

The Meaning of Data Is “to Give”: Health Equity in an Era of Community Engagement

Thursday, March 28, 3:45-5:30 Eldorado A (El Dorado Hotel)

Keynote Speaker: Juliet McMullin (UCI)
Commentators: Nancy Burke (UC-Merced) and Heide Castaneda (UFL)

The Meaning of Data Is “to Give”: Health Equity in an Era of Community Engagement. My paper engages the call for increased inclusion of community in research as critical to health equity and a question of data - a question of how we give. I consider the application of community engagement and data gathering within the framework of health equity, then turn to the implications of the call to expand the possibilities for epistemic and institutional change. In an era of everyone and potentially no one doing health equity, we must ask what health equity means as a right when its manifestations are always at the edge of becoming.

Juliet McMullin is a Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Director of the Medical Humanities and Arts Program at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Prior to her arrival at UCI in 2021, she was a faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside for 17 years. Her research focuses on anti-oppressive methodological interventions as a process of health equity. McMullin has broad expertise as a cultural and medical anthropologist, collaborating with Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Native American individuals and communities. This work focuses on the political economy of health and its relationship to concepts of health and wellbeing, knowledge, and practices related to land-based health in Hawai’i and California. Most recently, McMullin’s collaborative projects have connected Native Americans and Native Hawaiians to examine the role of art-making in mental wellness and placemaking (connecting to the locations where one works, lives, and plays). Each of these projects is grounded in community-engaged research.