Category Archives: College of Liberal Arts

LGBTQ+ health disparities and the impact of stress

Correlation does not equal causation. This phrase gets mentioned a lot in science. In part, because many scientists can fall into the trap of assuming that correlation equals causation. Proof that this phrase is true can be found in ice cream and sharks. Monthly ice cream sales and shark attacks are highly correlated in the United States each year. Does that mean eating lots of ice cream causes sharks to attack more people? No. The likely reason for this correlation is that more people eat ice cream and get in the ocean during the summer months when it’s warmer outside, which explain why the two are correlated. But, one does not cause the other. Correlation does not equal causation.

To date, much of the research that has been conducted on LGBTQ+ health has been correlational. Our guest this week, Kalina Fahey, hopes that her dissertation project will play a part in changing this paradigm as she is trying to get more at causation. Kalina is a 5^th year PhD candidate in the School of Psychological Science working with her advisors Drs. Anita Cservenka and Sarah Dermody. Her research broadly investigates LGBTQ+ health disparities and how stress impacts health in LGBTQ+ groups. She is also interested in understanding ways in which spiritual and/or religious identities can influence stress, and thereby, health. To do this, Kalina is employing a number of methods, including undertaking a systematic review to synthesize the existing research on substance use in transgender youth, analyzing large-scale publicly available datasets to look at how religious and spiritual identity relates to health outcomes, and finally developing a safe experiment to look at how specific forms of stress impact substance use-related behaviors in real time.

Most of Kalina’s time at the moment is being spent on the experimental portion of her research as part of her dissertation. For this study, Kalina is adapting the personalized guided induction stress paradigm, with the aim of safely eliciting minor stress responses in a laboratory setting. The experiment involves one virtual study visit and two in-person sessions. During the first visit, participants are asked to describe a minority-induced stressful event that occurred recently, as well as a description of a moment or situation that is soothing or calming. After this session, Kalina and her team develop two meditative scripts – one each to recreate the two events or moments described by the participant. When the participant comes back for their in-person sessions, they listen to one of two different meditative scripts and are asked a series of questions regarding their stress levels. Kalina and her team also are collecting saliva and heart rate readings to look at physiological stress levels. This project is still looking for participants. If you are a sexual-minority woman who drinks alcohol, consider checking out the following website to learn more about the study: https://oregonstate.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8e443Lq10lgyX66?fbclid=IwAR3XOdECIOvCbx1xn3QA5rrCtHfSezZrR5Ppkpnd9sx1SsicZRQnfYHAqb8. Kalina hopes to continue experiment-based research on LGBTQ+ health disparities in the future as she sees the lack of experimental studies to be a major gap in better understanding, and thereby supporting, the LGBTQ+ community.

Interested in learning more about Kalina’s research, the results, and her background? Listen live on Sunday, January 15, 2023 at 7 PM on 88.7 KBVR FM. Missed the live show? You can download the episode on our Podcast Pages! Also, check out her other work here or finder her on Twitter @faheypsych

Violence and Masculinity in Film

After a long summer hiatus, Inspiration Dissemination is back on the airwaves and your podcast platforms this week! Kicking off our Fall quarter lineup is Andrew Herrera, MA candidate with Jon Lewis in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film here at Oregon State University.

Herrera’s research might sound like a dream come true to some: “I study movies, honestly.”

For Herrera it really is a dream come true – he grew up with a lifelong love of film, inspired by watching movies with his mother as a child, the same movies that she had also grown up with. But it was after seeing Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 hit film Black Swan that he knew that studying film was going to be a career for him. The psychological horror production stars Natalie Portman as a dancer in a production of Swan Lake and follows her descent into madness as she struggles with a rival dancer. Herrera recalls that after seeing the film in theaters he sat in the car for several hours, just thinking about what he’d seen. This was around the time he learned that he could actually study film as an academic pursuit, and ended up writing about Black Swan for a literature class, comparing and contrasting it with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

He eventually finished his Bachelor’s degree in English Literature here at Oregon State University, and decided to stay and pursue a Master’s in Film Studies. His dissertation is focusing on the themes of three films by acclaimed Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn: Drive, Only God Forgives, and Bronson. Herrera is looking at the three films through the lens of masculinity, gender performativity and violence – all three center around male characters engaged in violent trajectories. Herrera in part argues that the three films present masculinity as a kind of performance or even a very literal costume, in the case of Drive (Ryan Gosling’s character is known for his iconic white jacket which sports a scorpion design, which he is only seen wearing when committing acts of violence.) The removal of weakness and femininity through violence and fighting leads to the rebirth of masculinity in Bronson, and in Only God Forgives features an almost Oedipal-like protagonist (also played by Ryan Gosling) who eventually cuts open the womb of his dead mother in a representation of asserting control over his own masculinity. Herrera is also interested in the intersection of masculinity and queerness in media, and how these themes show up explicitly or implicitly in these three and other films.

To hear more about these movies, the way masculinity is portrayed in film and its cultural impacts, and Herrera’s research, tune in to Inspiration Dissemination this Sunday evening at 7 PM at KBVR 88.7 FM or listen live online at https://kbvrfm.orangemedianetwork.com/. If you missed the live episode don’t forget to check out the podcast, now available wherever you get your podcasts.

Horror in Fiction

In 2021 Jordan Peele remade the 1992 cult horror classic, Candyman. The 2021 remake received critical success and despite being delayed several times due to the covid-19 pandemic, was a box office success as well. In both the 1992 and 2021 versions, the eponymous main character is a black man. But in the remake, the character deviates from the usual narrative trope of being a menacing black man to a man with complex emotions and feelings. For most viewers, these changes make for a good story, but likely are not things that they dwell on, and certainly are forgettable by the time they have left the theater. But for our guest this week, literature MA student Marisa Williams in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, these differences are what gives them inspiration and are what inform their research. While Marisa has just begun their thesis work, they know that they will examine issues of racism on black bodies within contemporary literature. Specifically, Marisa plans to explore how the legacy of colonialism has remained in the literature of French-Caribbean authors writing in the 21st century despite more than two centuries of emancipation from colonialism.

In order to do this kind of research, Marisa first has to learn about the history and philosophy of colonialism and post-colonial identity in the Caribbean. They plan to do this by exploring how notions of “Creole-ness,” the monstrosity of whiteness, and identity have all shaped the French-Caribbean experience in today’s literature. This has led Marisa to some interesting literary “rabbit holes,” that has taken them through history, philosophy, and fantasy literature.

To learn more about what is “Creole-ness,” the monstrosity of whiteness, and identity and how they relate to fantasy literature, tune in live on Sunday May 1st, 2022 on KBVR to listen. You can also catch more of Marisa’s story and research when they present as part of OSU’s 2022 Grad Inspire which will be taking place on May 12th.

Home Economics as a Science

Milam, ca. 1919. *Courtesy of Oregon Digital.*

At OSU there is a building called Milam Hall. It sits across the quad from the Memorial Union and houses many departments, including the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, where our guest this week, History and Philosophy of Science M.A. student Kathleen McHugh is housed. The building is certainly showing its age, with a perpetually leaky roof and well worn stairwells. But despite this, embedded in some of its classrooms, are hints of its former glory. It was once the location of the School of Home Economics, and was posthumously named after its longstanding dean, Ava B. Milam. While no books have been written about Milam, aside from her own autobiography, her story is one worth telling, and McHugh is doing just that with her M.A. thesis where she explores Milam’s deliberate actions to make home economics a legitimate scientific field.

Home Economics students cooking. *Courtesy of Industrial-Arts Magazine.*

During Milam’s tenure, home economics was a place where women could get an education and, most importantly, where they would not interfere with men’s scientific pursuits. It necessarily othered women and excluded them from science. But McHugh argues that Milam actively tried to shape home economics so that it was perceived as a legitimate science rather than a field of educational placation. And, as McHugh demonstrates through her research, in part due to Milam’s work, women are able to study science today without prejudice (well, for the most part. Obviously there is still a long way to go before there is full equality).

But exactly how Milam legitimized a field that–let’s be honest, probably immediately gives readers flashbacks of baking a cake in middle school or learning how to darn a sock –is exactly what McHugh explores in her thesis. Through meticulous archival research, and despite COVID hurdles, McHugh has created a compelling and persuasive narrative of Milam’s efforts to transform home economics into a science.

Guests waiting outside a tearoom at the 1919 San Francisco World’s Fair run by Home Economics students. *Courtesy of Industrial-Arts Magazine*.

Listen this week and learn how a cafe at the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair and a house near campus that ran a nearly 50 year adoption service relate to Milam and her pioneering work. If you missed the live show, listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Two ways of killing bacteria

You’re probably pretty familiar with a thing called antibiotics. You’ve most likely been prescribed them for a number of bacterial infections you may have had over the course of your life. Antibiotics are typically broad-spectrum, which can be good if the exact ailment a person is suffering from is uncertain. However, it can also be bad given that broad-spectrum antibiotics don’t just kill the bad bacteria, but they kill the good ones too. On top of this, antibiotic resistance is a pervasive issue. Alternatively, bacteriophages, which are viruses that attack bacteria, can be used to treat bacterial infections too. Bacteriophages are extremely effective at killing off a specific bacteria that you want to target. For example, there is a bacteriophage that specifically kills cholera, and nothing else. However, you have most likely never been treated with a bacteriophage for a bacterial infection. Why? Well, to understand that we’ve got to go back to the Cold War era (and even a little further). Enter Miriam Lipton, a PhD candidate in the College of Liberal Arts, whose research focuses on exactly this question.

There is speculation that the Cold War is the reason that there are these two ways to treat bacterial infections (antibiotics and bacteriophages), and Miriam is interested in this speculation as well as understanding how U.S. and Soviet scientists dealt with bacterial infections in real time during the Cold War period. To do this, Miriam is examining scientific papers and pharmaceutical trade journals from that time (1947-1991) to understand how scientists on either side thought about bacterial infections, their treatments, and antibiotic resistance. This quest has taken (or will take) Miriam to a number of different research institutions, including the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, Caltech in California, and the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy in Wisconsin. Reading scientific publications can be difficult enough as it is, however Miriam faces an added challenge of having to read many of the Soviet publications in Russian. Luckily, Miriam’s background lends itself quite well for this difficult task as one of her triple major’s during her Bachelor’s degree was Russian and she has a Master’s in Russian Studies from the University of Oregon, all of which have led to a good proficiency of the Russian language.

Miriam’s program at OSU is called History of Science and is quite rare. In fact, it is one of only four such programs in the country and Miriam is one of only four in her cohort at OSU. She is simultaneously a historian and a scientist on a mission to better understand past perceptions and thoughts of scientists about bacterial infections, to hopefully inform the present and future. Especially given the rise of antibiotic resistance across the globe.

Listen to the podcast episode of the show here to dive deep into the history of bacterial infection science!

Perceptions of trust

Imagine a final exam for a college course with hundreds of students. The proctor, a teacher’s assistant who has not interacted with any of the students before, is walking up and down the rows. She sees motion out of the corner of her eye. A small piece of paper is on the floor, covered in tiny print–answers to questions on the exam. She asks the student in the nearest desk, if the paper is his. Should the proctor believe him?

Most of the decisions we make in day-to-day life are unconscious. We don’t make up lists of pros and cons and consult experts when we have to decide what shoe should I tie first, what foot should enter my car first, or whether to I turn on the blinker 5 seconds or 10 seconds before turning. Having to weigh the pros and cons and carefully consider the consequences of every action would be exhausting, and could even be dangerous.

Zoe Alley, PhD Candidate in Psychology at Oregon State

Deciding whether to trust a stranger, however, is not at all inconsequential. Our brains unconsciously process faces to make decisions such as whether a person is, for example, aggressive, or whether they should be trusted. Zoe Alley, a PhD candidate in Psychology at Oregon State, has spent the last three years studying how facial trustworthiness impacts adolescents and new adults.

“People around the world, from many different cultures, from many different ethnicities, tend to hone in on the same facial characteristics when deciding who they want to trust,” Zoe said. Within the first few seconds of seeing a person’s face for the first time, your brain makes judgments of that person’s aggressiveness and trustworthiness (among other traits.) These snap judgements are often inaccurate, but have appeared consistently enough in participants in psychological studies that it is thought by some to be an evolved trait. Nineteenth and early twentieth century scientists went so far as to provide expert witness at trials, describing “typical” features of criminals. Although this view is no longer considered scientific, the human tendency to attempt to draw conclusions from appearances has been measured, with often concerning results.

As Zoe explains it, it is not clear that we have control over how our brain processes faces. And conscious attempts to address these biases can lead to over-correction, which is also undesirable.

Zoe speaking at GradX 2019 at Oregon State University. The faces shown are the Oosterhof-Todorov faces: computer-generated representations of a trustworthy and an untrustworthy face.

However, knowing how the human mind makes judgments is important. “It can help us make decisions about the structure of our society,” says Zoe. She points out some troubling findings looking at the justice system and elections. A 2004 study found that among a random sample of prison inmates, after controlling for race, people with more “Afrocentric” features received harsher sentences. A study from 2007 showed people contenders for Senate and governor’s races in the US and asked them to choose the more competent candidate, making sure that participants didn’t recognize either candidate. The winner of the race was selected 72% and 68% percent of the time, respectively — a far greater success rate than expected by chance.

Zoe’s own work focuses on how people are affected by facial traits such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, dominance, and exploitativeness. The data comes from a long running longitudinal study of about 200 boys in Oregon that started in the 1980s. Participants in the study were interviewed about once a year from adolescence into adulthood, with a special focus on understanding antisocial and deviant behaviors such as underage substance use and criminal behavior. Along with interviews, photographs of the participants were taken. However, these photographs had not yet been incorporated in any of the many studies based on the data set.

Processing the data was an enormous task. She analyzed facial structure development across 35 years of data for 200 participants. Each photo had to be considered individually, and to protect privacy she had to drive an hour to a secure facility to do the work. “I’m interested in seeing how facial characteristics develop across time, and how these characteristics alter people’s experience,” says Zoe. “Are people who look less trustworthy more likely to associate with deviant peers?”

Hear more about Zoe’s research findings and personal story this Sunday, June 9, 2019 at 7 pm on KBVR Corvallis 88.7FM. Stream the show live or catch the episode as a podcast in the coming weeks.

You can also watch Zoe’s GradX presentation here.

Being the Multilingual, Racialized “Other” in an English Dominated Linguistic Landscape

Jason at the whiteboard

Consider the language and messages you process each day. As you navigate your daily routine, what language do you hear and see most frequently? For folks living in the Corvallis, Oregon, the answer is probably English. In the last month, how many times, when, and where have you been exposed to spoken words or even signs in another language? For those of us on the Oregon State University campus, you could easily overhear or may participate in a conversation in Spanish, Chinese, or Arabic in the Memorial Union or Valley Library. How does the “linguistic landscape” (written or spoken words you encounter in life) affect you? What do you feel and how do you react to hearing a language you don’t understand? Have you been told that you don’t speak English well enough?

Shenanigans in Portland with Pat

Jason Sarkozi-Forfinski, a PhD student in Anthropology, wants to gain insight into the linguistic landscape students at Oregon State University are exposed to and their actions and feelings about about it, especially for students from non-English speaking countries. Jason’s research involves interviewing students and community members about their experiences in the US such as:

How do Thai-speaking folks fair when practicing English with a non-American accent?
How does a (white) American- English speaker from Roseburg regard different accents?
How do Mandarin speakers from Malaysia react to others speaking English with different accents?
How does an Arabic speaker from the Gulf region perceive their own accent?
How comfortable do Japanese speakers feel speaking a language other than English in the US?
How is all of this connected to the institutionalized tool of racism?

Jason has found that folks have preferences or biases about their linguistic landscape. Oregon State recruits both students from around the world and a large multilingual community of more local students. His respondents have reported being discouraged from speaking in a non-English language or facing negative social and professional consequences for speaking other languages or English with a non-(white)American accent. Could a preference for English with a (white) American accent perpetuate division? Or even bigoted practices?

Jason’s current research developed from years of conversations with friends and colleagues about being multilingual in the US. He began exploring language in his undergraduate education where he majored in Spanish and also studied Portuguese. He also studied English in Miami,

Grilled cheese on a school bus in Portland with Veronica (left) and husband, Nick.

Florida, and worked to understand how non-English languages influences local English. Before coming to OSU for his PhD, Jason has worked as a Spanish and English instructor in the US, Spain, Japan, and China.

Tune in to KBVR Corvallis 88.7 FM on Sunday March, 10 at 7 PM to hear more about Jason’s research and his path to graduate school. Stream the show live or catch this episode as a podcast.

Clarification [See Podcast at 25:45]: Asking someone to change their accent, according to Lippi-Green a linguistic who wrote “Speaking with an Accent,” is like asking someone to change their height. It’s doable (with lots of surgery) but would require a lot of intervention. The point here is that it’s not realistic to ask someone to work on their accent. It’s also rather demeaning.

3D Modeling Rock Shape: Archeological Research of the Earliest North Americans

At age 17, like a lot of teenagers, Samuel Burns wanted to go to college. Unlike most college-bound 17-year-olds however, Samuel didn’t have a high school degree. Today, Samuel is a first-year master’s student in Applied Anthropology, within the School of Language, Culture, and Society, and the Department of Anthropology. Also, this is his second master’s degree.

Samuel in the field in the Allegheny National Forest, Pennsylvania. Photo by Samuel Burns.

Samuel works with Dr. Loren Davis to investigate the earliest archeological sites in North America, and there are two big questions to answer: when did humans first arrive in North America, and by what route did the earliest humans arrive? Traditionally, humans are thought to have entered North America through the Rocky Mountains, but more recent evidence suggests that maritime cultures may have arrived first, finding North America via the ocean. The oldest fish hooks in North America are somewhere between ~11,300 to 10,700 years years old and were discovered off the coast of Baja California, Mexico on Cedros Island.

Cedros Island is just one of two archeological sites of interest for Samuel’s research group, and while he has been to Cedros to conduct fieldwork, Samuel’s work focuses on artifacts from one pit in the second site: Cooper’s Ferry in Cottonwood, Idaho, near the Salmon River. From Cooper’s Ferry, seemingly interesting artifacts are brought back to the lab where they are sorted, confirmed to be artifacts, and studied.

L-R: Loren White (OSU), Steve Jenevein (Oregon State Parks), and Samuel Burns on board the flight from Cedros Island, Baja California, Mexico after a successful field session in January, 2019. Photo by Samuel Burns.

Samuel is able to take the artifacts, make 3D scans of the object, and input this information into a computational program. The computer converts the 3D scans into mathematical shapes and 3D models. So instead of looking at a couple things by eye and estimating if artifacts are similar or different, the program can compare large sets of data with discreet numbers and make conclusions about whether or not two artifacts found in different places have similar shapes. This allows researchers to ask questions about tool development over time and place.

To make 3D images, a laser scanner has been used in the past, but this is both expensive and large, so new methods are actively being developed for this purpose. One option is a structured light scanner, which has a light shining through multiple holes. To use a structured light scanner, you place your artifact on a patterned background and take lots of photos at many angles, producing a large amount of data to feed the computer program. Another easier option for 3D modeling is photogrammetry, which only requires a camera and a computer, even just a phone camera will work. This soft ware used is called “GLiMR” (GIS-based Lithic Morphometric Research) and is based on GIS software for modeling geographical landscapes, and the automation and ease of such a program enables archeologists to spend less time collecting numbers and more time assessing these numbers through statistical analyses and asking interesting questions.

Samuel’s crew lining up to conduct a systematic surface survey near Paulina, Oregon. Photo by Samuel Burns.

When you think about ancient North American stone artifacts, megafauna hunting tools like arrow heads and spears come to mind. However, in both the Cedros and Cooper’s Ferry sites, simpler tools are being found that suggest early North Americans exploited a wide range of resources and had a broad-spectrum diet. For example, artifacts found include shell or stone tools for processing fiber to making fishing line.

Samuel using a digital total station to take measurements at a Medieval Christian period site at el Kurru, Northern State, Sudan. Photo by Walter De Winter.

Growing up, Samuel never went to school and wasn’t homeschooled, but always loved history. He lived in an 1850s farmhouse, and spent his childhood going through old objects from his backyard, left behind over the past 100+ years. At age 17, realizing he wanted to go to college but not having the traditional requirements, Samuel applied to a University in Jerusalem and got in. After spending a year there, he ran out of money, and spent next few years working and moving around the world, including in South Korea and Israel. Eventually, he returned to the US and jumped back into school at a community college in Michigan and ultimately transferred to the University of Michigan, where he focused on ancient cultures and language of middle east.

Field camp near Colt, Arkansas, home for 6 months in 2016-2017. Photo by Samuel Burns.

Samuel graduated from UM in 2010 and then got a master’s degree at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, focusing on Egyptian studies. This first master’s centered around Syria and unfortunately, this research project was not able to be pursued further, so Samuel spent the next five years working in cultural resource management in the US. Through this job, he was able to travel around the US and soon became interested in North American archeological research. Samuel had a strong liberal arts background but, wanting to expand his earth science knowledge, came to Oregon State.

Eventually, Samuel wants to obtain a PhD and work in academia, continuing to formulate and direct research projects.

To hear more about Samuel’s path to OSU and experiences in archeological research, tune in Sunday, February 16th at 7 PM on KBVR 88.7 FM, live stream the show at http://www.orangemedianetwork.com/kbvr_fm/, or download our
podcast on iTunes!

Davis, L. G., Bean, D. W., Nyers, A. J., & Brauner, D. R. (2015). GLiMR: A GIS-Based Method for the Geometric Morphometric Analysis of Artifacts. Lithic Technology, 40(3), 199–217.

Des Lauriers, M. R., Davis, L. G., Turnbull, J., Southon, J. R., & Taylor, R. E. (2017). The Earliest Shell Fishhooks from the Americas Reveal Fishing Technology of Pleistocene Maritime Foragers. American Antiquity, 82(3), 498–516.

Exploring immigrant identity through poetry

As a 2nd year MFA student in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, Tatiana Dolgushina is writing her history through poetry as a way to understand herself and the country she came from that no longer exists. Born in Soviet Russia, Tatiana and her family fled the country after it collapsed in 1991. Tatiana grew up in South America and came to the US when she was 12, settling in Ohio. She remarks, “so much cultural history of Soviet Russia is influencing who I am today.” Central to her work are ideas of identity formation and childhood displacement. Through writing, she is digging deeper into her experience as an immigrant growing up in multiple countries.

To better understand the root of her identity, Tatiana is reading about the history that led to the dissolution of Soviet Russia. Reading about the history has helped her to understand the events that led to her family’s displacement. She grew up with silence surrounding why they had left, explaining, “Soviet culture is based on a fear of talking about historical events.” She reflects on feeling shame associated with being an immigrant, and in “not belonging to the old place or the new place.” A fractured in-between place. “As a kid, when you’re displaced, you lose so much: language, traditions, and culture.” She further explains, “you seek assimilation as a kid, and either forget these things, or push them away.”

Tatiana explains that poetry is a catalyst for understanding herself and more broadly, for us to understand ourselves as humans. It’s about connecting the dots. Her family doesn’t speak about what transpired. But reading the history, it begins to make sense. “When you’re a kid, you’re focused on survival.” She reflects that she has been trying to compensate for certain things, and is now understanding how and why she is different. She realized, “the older I get, the more I feel it, my immigrant self emerging.” Her experience growing up in multiple countries has contributed to her identity formation, but she admits that she doesn’t have a space to talk about it. “I blend in, but still feel like an outsider. I am not of this culture, and I realize that I really have no home because my home is not a country.”

Tatiana is still trying to figure out what her writing is about, but articulates that writing is a process of not being able to say certain things in the beginning. It’s about writing through the memory and being able to see the things you need to see when you’re ready, peeling away each layer of experience. Approaching the writing process linearly, Tatiana began writing about early memories, then proceeded beyond to older memories, asking, for example, “why did I write about that nightmare I had when I was 4 years old?”

Originally trained as a wildlife biologist, Tatiana decided to change directions after spending time pursuing a Master’s degree. When she initially began the MFA program, she was shocked at the discussion of subjective ideas, which is so different from many areas of scientific discourse. In science, the focus is not so much on identity. But, she explains, “science and art are coming from the same place. It’s about observation, and understanding through observation.”

As a personal goal, Tatiana is working towards publishing a book. It has been something she has wanted to do for many years. “The hope is that a 15 year old immigrant kid in the library will read it and be able to relate to my story.”

Tatiana studies with Dr. Karen Holmberg and will be graduating this Spring. Tune in on Sunday, February 3rd at 7pm on KBVR 88.7 FM to hear more from Tatiana about her thesis work and experience as a graduate student at OSU. You can also stream the show or download our podcast on iTunes!

Applying medical anthropology: a history of stress in Puerto Rico and its impacts on birth outcomes

Over the course of the last six years, Holly Horan, a doctoral candidate in the Applied Anthropology program at Oregon State University, has developed and carried out a course of research culminating in the largest-ever study measuring perceived and biological maternal stress during and after pregnancy in Puerto Rico. By combining in-depth interviews with Puerto Rican mothers with quantitative analysis of perceived stress and the stress hormone cortisol during each stage of pregnancy, Holly has gained insights into both the perceived and the physiological components of maternal stress that have potential to impact birth outcomes (in particular, timing of birth).

Holly describes herself as an applied medical anthropologist. She strives to take a holistic approach to health, considering not only the physiology of an individual, but external factors as well: the political situation, economics, the culture, and the historical context of the research site. She is passionate about “community-led research.” In community-led research, the community where the research is being conducted takes a role in the development, execution, analysis, and evaluation of the research.

Holly has found a way to combine her personal and professional interests in maternal and infant health with her desire to engage in research with Puerto Rican communities. Holly’s mother is Puerto Rican, and she had long wanted to engage in research that could benefit the island. While completing a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Montana, Holly did preliminary research on the early onset of puberty among Puerto Rican girls. Here at OSU, Holly has been able to use both qualitative and quantitative methods to research maternal and infant health within a community-led framework.

At the beginning of her dissertation research, Holly learned that the cesarean birth rate in Puerto Rico was close to 50% — far higher than the rate in the continental U.S., which hovers around 30%. Both rates are much higher than the rate recommended by the World Health Organization, which indicates that the cesarean birth rate should be no higher than 15%. She also learned that the island struggled with high incidence of preterm birth and low birth weight, both of which are important population-level health indicators. Holly’s advisor, Dr. Melissa Cheyney, is a home-birth midwife and an associate professor within the Applied Anthropology program in the School of Language, Culture, and Society. Dr. Cheyney helped connect Holly to Puerto Rican midwives, who, in turn, connected them to other medical providers in Puerto Rico.

In the summer of 2014, Holly conducted a pilot study, spending six weeks in Puerto Rico interviewing maternal and infant health-care professionals. These interviews allowed her to develop goals for her dissertation research that aligned with the needs of the community. Participant narratives frequently displayed concerns associated with unexplainable high rates of preterm birth.

Holly’s National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded dissertation research examined the relationship between perceived maternal stress, biological maternal stress, and prematurity. After the 2014 pilot study, she moved to Puerto Rico for 16 months, where she used semi-structured interviews and perceived stress questionnaires to develop an understanding of this relationship. In addition to this qualitative component, she also measured the stress hormone cortisol from maternal hair samples. Cortisol is one of the most well-understood biological stress indicators. Up until recently, the primary available way to measure cortisol levels was through blood or saliva samples, which provided only an indication of short-term stress. As it turns out, however, cortisol is also incorporated into hair. Hair cortisol provides a measure of long-term stress — the type of stress that is speculated to impact maternal and infant health outcomes, including preterm birth.

In the summer of 2016, Holly initiated her dissertation research with an extensive series of in-depth interviews with pregnant and recently-postpartum women. At this time, the ZIKA virus was declared a public health emergency, and there was a variety of public health messaging concerning delayed reproduction and the risk of microcephaly. Through these interviews, Holly learned that the U.S. Government’s public health messaging led to an internal conflict for many pregnant Puerto Rican women. Families felt stress and fear about the prospect of infants developing microcephaly. However, the warnings and official recommendations to delay reproduction provided uncomfortable reminders of the island’s colonial past, which includes targeted experimental clinical trials of oral contraceptives and sterilization offered primarily to low-income women. This led many interviewees to be skeptical about the threat of the Zika virus, but did not deter them from being concerned for their fetus’ well-being.

These participants identified sources of stress that varied widely, ranging from socioeconomic concerns, political changes, and gender-based inequalities. For example, in May 2016, Puerto Rico’s government defaulted on over 70 billion dollars of debt. Under the regulations passed by La Junta, the appointed fiscal board, many employees were fired and then rehired for lower pay. Also affected was the secondary public-school system: nearly 150 schools were closed. While these events are structural, the interviews revealed that within the Puerto Rican people, the impact of the events was personal, and the magnitude of impacts depended on individuals social support networks and life circumstances.

After comparing maternal cortisol levels with the perceived maternal stress from the structured surveys, which were collected in each trimester across pregnancy, Holly found a counter-intuitive result: some of the mothers who had most problems with their pregnancies (such as premature birth) had unusually low levels of cortisol. One current theory is the concepts of allostasis or allostatic load and “weathering,” a term which has been in the media in recently describing the cumulative effects of chronic stress on health (discussed in an NPR interview here in the context of race-based discrimination). Normally, the body responds to stress by heightening the amount of hormones such as cortisol. After the stressor is removed, hormone levels shift back to a low-stress state. However, if stress is prolonged over months or years–such as when living under a system of oppression–the body starts to experience “wear-and-tear,” causing the body’s stress response system to become ineffective. This ultimately impacts health outcomes, such as premature birth.

There have been road bumps along the way. In late summer 2017, Holly was nearly three quarters completed with data collection and the project was moving along smoothly. However, Mother Nature had different plans: In September 2017, Puerto Rico was hit first by Hurricane Irma and then by Category 4 Hurricane Maria two weeks later. The hurricanes destroyed the power grid and most of the island’s infrastructure. Holly was evacuated by OSU a week after the storm. Although she was worried about the well-being of her participants, and the impact this storm would have on the research project, NSF and her other funders graciously supported her to return and complete the study, which she did in February and March of 2018. As a separate side-project, Holly plans to return to Puerto Rico this summer to share study results with the community and with community partners.

To hear more about Holly’s research, tune in Sunday, December 9th at 7 PM on KBVR 88.7 FM, live stream the show at http://www.orangemedianetwork.com/kbvr_fm/, download our podcast on iTunes, or listen to this episode directly!