African American and Latina community health workers engage PhotoPAR as a resource in a post-disaster context: Katrina at 5 years.
This article reports on participatory action and photo elicitation research conducted by community health workers and university-based researchers in post-Katrina New Orleans between August 2007 and 2010. It documents how 11 African American and Latina women community health workers forged ties and developed a model for responding to some of the personal, familial, and community effects of this "unnatural disaster." We identify and analyze two of the health literacies they developed and deployed: (1) intragroup and intergroup empathy skills and (2) capacity to critically analyze structural causes of health inequities. We argue that the participatory processes and outcomes analyzed herein offer one possible model through which local communities and health workers can creatively respond to health disparities in post-disaster contexts.
School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70112, USA. hollyscheib@gmail.com
Holly A
HA
Scheib
M Brinton
MB
Lykes
D000328:Adult; D001741:Black or African American; D003150:Community Health Workers / Q000458:organization & administration*; D055867:Cyclonic Storms; D004190:Disasters; D005260:Female; D057220:Health Literacy / Q000379:methods / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006293:Health Promotion / Q000379:methods / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006630:Hispanic or Latino; D006801:Humans; D055820:New Orleans / Q000208:ethnology; D010781:Photography; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D017741:Survivors / Q000523:psychology*; D014481:United States
community health promotion; health behavior; inequalities; participatory action research; photo elicitation; post-disaster interventions