Scope of Guide:
The goal of this guide is to highlight and provide access to Queen's University Library resources on Anti-Racism in the Health Sciences. We hope to provide researchers and other Queen's University community members with an introduction to anti-racism in health and provide them with a meaningful guide to navigating important library resources on this subject. For more information about Indigenous Health, please see our Indigenous Health LibGuide.
This guide is not exhaustive and is a living document that will continue to be updated when new resources and information becomes available. We would also like to acknowledge that some resources featured within this guide make use of the term "minority/minorities" which suggests a white-centered viewpoint in which diverse groups are considered only insofar as they are 'non-white', thereby disengaging with the cultural, socioeconomic, and overall context of these communities.
The Library seeks to augment the voices from underserved, underrepresented, and marginalized communities by collecting materials written by and for these communities. As such, we encourage readers to provide resource and content recommendations. They can be submitted through the Recommend a New Collection Acquisition form or by contacting Bracken Health Science reference email bracken.library@queensu.ca.
This guide includes adapted information and resources from the following guides; Anti-Black Racism (McGill), Anti-Racism and Medicine (MCPHS), Anti-Black Racism Reading List (QUL-Stauffer). We would also like to thank the EDI Program Manager from the Queen's University Faculty of Health Sciences Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Office for her knowledge and insight during the initial planning stages of this guide.
The new second edition of this forward-thinking text goes beyond the discussion of health disparities to highlight the importance of health equity. As the new title suggests, Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: Context, Controversies, and Solutions helps the reader understand key social justice issues relevant to health disparities and/or health equity, taking the reader from the classroom to the real world to implement new solutions.The new Second Edition features:- Two new chapters: one on the impact of urban education on urban health (Ch 4) and another covering the elderly and health equity (Ch 10)- Updated and enhanced coverage on men's health, demographic data, the importance of cultural proficiency, maternal mortality and Black women, and much more.- Current trends and movements, including the role of social media in the provision of health care information for improved health literacy; mass incarceration and criminal justice reform; and new efforts toward resolving health disparities.- Case studies and problems that engage students in thinking about health disparities/equity and diversity issues and prompt them to consider possible solutions.
This field of Black girls' and women's health (BGWH) science is both transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary. As such, the contributors to this edited collection offer a unique lens to BGWH science, expanding our collective scientific worldviews. The contributing authors draw upon their ontological and epistemological knowledge to formulate pathways and inform methodologies for doing research and praxis to address BGWH. Each contributor draws upon these knowledges and offers the reader a way to better understand how their framing and writing can create change in the health of Black girls and women.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online.
Black men are increasingly underrepresented in medical schools and in the medical profession. A diverse workforce is a key attribute of quality healthcare and research suggests that a diverse workforce may help to advance cultural competency and increase access to high-quality health care, especially for underserved populations. Conversely, lack of diversity in the health workforce threatens health care quality and access and contributes to health disparities. In this way, the growing absence of Black men in medicine is especially troubling, because their absence in medicine may have adverse consequences for health care access, quality, and outcomes among Black Americans and Americans overall. To better understand the factors that contribute to the low participation of Black men in the medical profession, facilitate discussion of current strategies used to increase their participation in medical education, and explore new strategies along the educational and professional pipeline that may have potential to increase participation in medicine, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Cobb Institute jointly convened a 2-day workshop in November 2017, in Washington, DC. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family--especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
