BCSM Projects

FOODCIRCUITS is an ethnographic project investigating the connections between migrants and the societies of which they form part, as well as the ways in which these connections are invisibilized. Most fruit and vegetables required and enjoyed by European and North American societies would not be possible without the planting, harvesting and transporting performed by laborers categorized as migrants and othered by these societies. The project follows German asparagus, Spanish oranges, and California strawberries through the processes of production, transportation and consumption. By investigating the embodied experiences of migrant farm labourers, supply chain workers, and consumers in relation with these fruits and vegetables, the project offers a novel approach to understand forms of post/colonial relations, nationalisms, racialization and racism, embodied experiences including health and health care, interdependencies, human-environment relations, and invisibilization.

Principal Investigator: Seth M. Holmes
German Asparagus Circuit Postdoctoral Researcher: Alexandra Voivozeanu
Spanish Orange Circuit Postdoctoral Researcher: Ana Portilla
California Strawberries Circuit Postdoctoral Researcher: Mael Vizcarra
Visual ethnographer: Alesandra Tatić
Austrian Greenhouses: Paul Sperneac-Wolfer, PhD student
Project Manager: Mateu Font Mugnaini

Black Feminist Health Science Studies (BFHSS) is an emerging discipline created by interdisciplinary scholars who started their careers as undergraduates studying Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Black women have been one of the most ignored and marginalized groups in the history of social justice and healthcare. It is the hope that breaking down barriers that prevent health care access and equity for Black women will assist in the dismantling of barriers for other marginalized groups. The hope for this discipline is to be an inclusive one that addresses intersectional issues of race, gender and class. We also hope to demonstrate the necessity for understanding how societal factors prevent healthcare from being accessible as human right, not a privilege or commodity.

Led by Adeola Oni-Orisan (UC Davis), Ugo Edu (UCLA), Moya Bailey (Northeastern), Sheyda Aboii (UCSF/UCB). Co-sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. For more information or contact: bfhsscollaboratory@gmail.com

This project trains UCB undergraduate students to document and reflect on their own and their families' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. By engaging in what anthropologists call auto-ethnography, the students avoid exposing themselves or others to infection that would result from usual face-to-face methods of studying the impact of the pandemic. A key focus is on the impact of COVID-19 on Latinx populations in California. The project findings will be shared in a podcast. This project is funded by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and is a collaboration with the Latinx Research Center

Principal Investigators: Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs

Technical Lead: Daniel Marquez, BA, Podcast Manager, Latinx Research Center

Research Assistants: Gissel Rosales, Public Health major, UC Berkeley, and Brandon Rubio, BA, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley, c/o 2021 

Due to the low pay of farmworkers and resultant lack of family financial resources, indigenous Mexican immigrant students often have to work full-time while also attending school full-time. The scholarship supports first gen community college students. The scholarship provides between $200 and $400 per month to selected students, depending on their GPA the previous semester. These amounts were determined in consultation with indigenous Mexican immigrant community members. The students who have received the scholarship in the inaugural year are all  the first in their family to pursue higher education in the U.S. and each is fluent in English, Spanish and Triqui. Each is a student at Madera Community College and hopes to transfer to a four year university. To learn more about the scholarship and how you can support it, click here

BCSM Co-Chair Seth M. Holmes, German scholars, and affiliates from Georgetown received funds from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to produce a case series on migration. Seth M. Holmes and Emily Mendenhall (Georgetown) are the case series editors. The Migration and Health in Social Context Collection, published in BMJ Global Health (2021) describes three useful frameworks from medical social sciences that are lacking in medical and public health literature. This collection uses case studies of health and migration to present frameworks of 1) deservingness, 2) structural vulnerability, and 3) flourishing. Each of these articles comes from the social science analysis often called “mobility” that understands migration as a common reality for humans throughout history as opposed to the usual way we respond to migration as unusual, unexpected, or problematic. Each article uses concise ethnographic case narratives from diverse geopolitical locations in the world to illustrate how these frameworks relate to medicine and public health.

The Clinical Ethnography Group brings together students, faculty, and trainees from UC Berkeley, UCSF, and the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program to build community and discuss current topics around conducting ethnographic research in and around clinical spaces. We welcome everyone from those who have never completed ethnographic research and would like to learn more about how to do so, to researchers preparing for or currently in the field, and professionals with established research experience. Meetings occur monthly. Light reading and/or writing on the month’s topic sometimes encouraged. To learn more and get involved with our next meeting, please contact Jeremy Gottlieb at jeremy.gottlieb@ucsf.edu

Borders and Bodies Collective aims to raise consciousness around immigration and health. Our vision is to create a safe space to discuss health issues affecting our communities, increase visibility of immigrant health, and engage in critical discussions to better understand and address the issues affecting immigrant communities.

This laboratory-seminar is designed as a collaborative crucible for new forms of medical and community mental health practice. We ask: how can we envision and design innovative ways of addressing inequities and inequalities in clinical medicine, as informed by critical theory as well as clinical and personal experience? Bringing together not only scholars from multiple disciplines, but also physicians, patients, and community members, this project makes the collective education of all its members a priority.

One component of the working group has been the development, implementation, and evaluation of a structural competency training for medical residents. That work is described in "Teaching Structure: A Qualitative Evaluation of a Structural Competency Training for Resident Physicians" by Joshua Neff, Kelly Knight, Shannon Satterwhite, Nick Nelson, Jenifer Matthews, and Seth Holmes, published in April 2017 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. More details about the training are included in the chapter “The Structural Competency Working Group: Lessons from Iterative, Interdisciplinary Development of a Structural Competency Training Module.” The chapter, authored by group members Joshua Neff, Seth M. Holmes, Shirley Strong, Gregory Chin, Jorge De Avila, Sam Dubal, Laura G. Duncan, Jodi Halpern, Michael Harvey, Kelly Ray Knight, Elaine Lemay, Brett Lewis, Jenifer Matthews, Nick Nelson, Shannon Satterwhite, Ariana Thompson-Lastad, and Lily Walkover is in the 2019 volume Structural Competency in Mental Health and Medicine, edited by Helena Hansen and Jonathan Metzl. The complete curriculum, "Structural Competency: Curriculum for Medical Students, Residents, and Interprofessional Teams on the Structural Factors That Produce Health Disparities," along with a discussion of the implementation and outcomes, was published in March 2020 on the MedEd Portal and is available for free download here.

The working group issued a position statement on racism, police violence, and health equity.Structural Competency Working Group Position Statement

To learn more about the working group, visit the website. 

Health Effects Associated with Racism Threat: Cultivating Strong HEARTs and Minds!

The HEART Research Group promotes research and scholarship related to the emodiment of stress with a focus on racial health disparities and racial health inequities. We use a social-psycho-biological framework to interrogate the intersection of socio-environmental risk, psychosocial processes, and the biological embedding of social experience. Though our focus is on understanding racism as a determinant of individual and population health, we investigate and consider other social experiences associated with stigma and social disadvantage. Our activities include group discussion, article reviews, developing manuscripts/publications, and conference presentations. Current projects include: 1) Racial discrimination and premature physiologic aging among midlife African American women, 2) Development and validation of the Anticipatory Racism Scale, 3) Understanding the education/mortality gradient in the US by intersections of age, race, and gender, and 4) Being a SuperWoman: How Black women cope with racism stress.

This research group is led by Amani M. Allen (formerly Nuru-Jeter), Associate Professor of Public Health, UC Berkeley. The group is not currently accepting new members.

Seth Holmes, Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and Associate Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology, and co-PI Scott Stonington, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, commissioned and edited a series of case studies to communicate the macro structures affecting the health and well-being of patients in ways that will influence the programs, projects, and care provided by global health professionals. Each article is co-authored by a clinician who will describe aspects of a clinical case and by a social medicine scholar who analyze the case to bring out social structural insights vital to the understanding and practice of health care. This project is funded by the Open Society Foundations.

View the Case Series Here

Since 2014, there has been a large increase in the numbers of unaccompanied migrant children from Central America entering the U.S. across the U.S. Mexico border. While these children have been at the center of a media firestorm, little is known about their health, mental health, and educational needs, and how U.S. communities are responding to those needs. This BCSM research project, in collaboration with the Center for Research on Social Change and Center for Latino Policy Research, investigated the national, state, and Bay Area contexts to identify how many children are in detention, how many children have been released to family members and other sponsors, and the general patterns of their needs, as well as Bay Area community responses. The results are available in a Fact Sheet, as a downloadable pdf in both English and Spanish. BCSM also sponsored a symposium in the fall of 2014 on Children at the Border, Children at the Margins: Health, Responsibility, and Immigration