National Public Health Week
It Starts Here: Your Health is Our mission
This key priority area includes social cohesion, supporting mental health, increasing access to healthy food, and the benefits of parks.
Did you know WSULS has access to streaming media? Here are some films on theme:
- The Antidote (2020) Made in response to the times we are living in, THE ANTIDOTE weaves together stories of kindness, decency, and the power of community in America
- BEDLAM (2019) Through intimate stories of patients, families, and medical providers, BEDLAM immerses us in America’s national crisis surrounding care of the severely mentally ill. Filmed over five years, it brings us inside one of the nation’s busiest psychiatric emergency rooms, into jails where psychiatric patients are warehoused, and to the homes – and homeless encampments – of mentally ill members of our communities.
- Food Chains (2014) There is more interest in food these days than ever, yet there is very little interest in the hands that pick it. Farmworkers, the foundation of our fresh food industry, are routinely abused and robbed of wages. In extreme cases they can be beaten, sexually harassed or even enslaved - all within the borders of the United States. Food Chains reveals the human cost in our food supply and the complicity of large buyers of produce like fast food and supermarkets.
Care WorkISBN: 9781551527383Publication Date: 2018Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labour, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of colour. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.
The well-connected community : a networking approach to community developmentISBN: 9781447347880Publication Date: 2019There is a growing recognition of the importance of networking for the vitality and cohesion of community life. Now in its third edition, and substantially updated, this textbook combines practical experience and theory for people working with and for communities.
Ties That EnableISBN: 9781978818798Publication Date: 2021This book provides insights into how communities and system level reforms can promote justice and the higher ideals we aspire to as a society.
The Sharing Economy in EuropeISBN: 9783030868963Publication Date: 2022This open access book considers the development of the sharing and collaborative economy with a European focus, mapping across economic sectors, and country-specific case studies. It looks at the roles the sharing economy plays in sharing and redistribution of goods and services across the population in order to maximize their functionality, monetary exchange, and other aspects important to societies
Climate Action Starts Here
"Climate change impacts both physical and mental health through rising temperatures, poor air quality, extreme weather events and disrupted ecosystems. These effects are felt most in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, which have faced years of underinvestment and systemic inequities, making them more vulnerable to climate risks. However, there is hope and a clear path forward. By taking bold and equitable action, we can reduce the health effects of climate change and build stronger, healthier communities. Solutions include rapidly transitioning to clean energy, improving energy efficiency, and supporting sustainable food systems." Learn more about this key priority area here!
Films:
- Onanya (2023) In the verdant, lush jungles of the Amazon, a tribe of indigenous people has lived in harmony with their surroundings for millennia. The Shipibo tribe has learned the secrets of the earth, honing their knowledge to transform the native flora into powerful medicines that can cure any sickness. But their peaceful existence is threatened. The outside world has discovered the valuable treasures of their land - the rich minerals, the unique wildlife, and the breathtaking landscape are all at risk. As the knowledge grows, so does the threat of an ancient culture dissolving. The tribe must fight to protect their way of life and preserve the centuries-old knowledge of their healing practices.
- Once Upon a Time in a Forest (2024) Once Upon a Time in a Forest is a cinematic tribute to young activists fighting to protect Finland’s forests from the powerful forestry industry and political interests. This tale’s ending—whether a "happily ever after" or ecological disaster—depends on the dedication of Minka, Ida, and their allies.
- Not Without Us (2016) Demonstrating the power of the masses to challenge Big Oil interests, Not Without Us is an all too timely document of the grassroots struggle for significant climate action. Taking place in the months leading up to COP21 in Paris, the film chronicles activists from around the world and the different tactics they use to make their voices heard. Starting nine months before the conference, the film takes us around the globe -- from North America to Europe to West Africa to South America -- as several activists fight for meaningful change. Indigenous activists in particular are highlighted as they outline how environmental rights are also human rights and that violations often hit them the hardest.
- The Here Now Project (2024) With no narration or talking heads, The Here Now Project transforms simple cell phone videos into powerful acts of witness, capturing the immense global scale of climate change and the extraordinary resilience, courage, and resourcefulness needed to confront it.
Confronting Climate ColonialityISBN: 9781040176542Publication Date: 2024Confronting Climate Coloniality exposes how legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism co-produce and exacerbate the climate crisis, create disproportionate impacts on those who contributed the least to climate change, and influence global and local responses.
Climate Justice and Participatory ResearchISBN: 9781773854663Publication Date: 2023Climate catastrophe throws into stark relief the extreme, life-threatening inequalities that affect millions of lives worldwide. The poorest and most marginalized, who are least responsible for the consumption and emissions that create climate change, are the first and hardest impacted, and the least able to protect themselves. Climate justice is simultaneously a movement, an academic field, an organizing principle, and a political demand.
Feminist Frontiers in Climate JusticeISBN: 9781803923789Publication Date: 2023Feminist Frontiers in Climate Justiceprovides a compelling demonstration of the deeply gendered and unequal effects of the climate emergency, alongside the urgent need for a feminist perspective to expose and address these structural political, social and economic inequalities. Taking a nuanced, multidisciplinary approach, this book explores new ways of thinking about how climate change interacts with gender inequalities and feminist concerns with rights and law, and how the human world is bound up with the non-human, natural world.
The Routledge Handbook of Grassroots Climate ActivismISBN: 9781040230527Publication Date: 2024The Routledge Handbook of Grassroots Climate Activism introduces contemporary forms of grassroots climate activism from around the world through the lenses of a variety of academic disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives. Focusing on bottom-up case studies, it showcases innovative and creative approaches, as well as the knowledge of those working towards swift decarbonisation, just transitions, and climate justice.
Health Equity Starts Here
Learn more about this key priority area here. This research guide about Equity and Medicine has numerous helpful resources, too!
Films and media:
- How to Survive a Plague (2012) Faced with their own mortality, an improbable group of mostly HIV - positive young men and women broke the mold as radical warriors taking on Washington and the medical establishment. Despite having no scientific training, these self - made activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time. How To Survive A Plague is the story of how activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition.
- Unnatural Causes Series by American Public Television (2014) "Unnatural causes sounds the alarm about the extent of our glaring socio-economic and racial inequities in health and searches for their root causes. But those causes are not what we might expect. While we pour more and more money into drugs, dietary supplements and new medical technologies, Unnatural causes crisscrosses the country investigating the findings that are shaking up conventional understanding of what really makes us healthy or sick. This is a story that implicates us all."
- DNA Is Not Destiny: How The Outside Gets Under The Skin (2015) The Raising of America, by the producers of Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? and RACE - The Power of an Illusion, is the ground-breaking documentary series, online learning hub and public engagement campaign which reframes the way Americans look at early child health and development. It illustrates how a strong start for all our kids leads not only to better learning, earning, and physical and mental health but also to a healthier, safer, better educated, more prosperous nation.
Under the SkinISBN: 9780385544894Publication Date: 2022PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST In Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to "live sicker and die quicker" compared to their white counterparts. Today's medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading.
SkimmedISBN: 1503601129Publication Date: 2019In Skimmed, Andrea Freeman tells the riveting story of the Fultz quadruplets while uncovering how feeding America's youngest citizens is awash in social, legal, and cultural inequalities. This book highlights the making of a modern public health crisis, the four extraordinary girls whose stories encapsulate a nationwide injustice, and how we can fight for a healthier future.
Body and SoulISBN: 9780816678754Publication Date: 2011Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Nelson argues that the Party's focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers' People's Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent. The Black Panther Party's understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy--and that struggle--continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.
Fighting for a Hand to Hold : Confronting Medical Colonialism Against Indigenous Children in CanadaISBN: 9780228005131Publication Date: 2020Launched by healthcare providers in January 2018, the #aHand2Hold campaign confronted the Quebec government's practice of separating children from their families during medical evacuation airlifts, which disproportionately affected remote and northern Indigenous communities. Pediatric emergency physician Samir Shaheen-Hussain's captivating narrative of this successful campaign, which garnered unprecedented public attention and media coverage, seeks to answer lingering questions about why such a cruel practice remained in place for so long.
Advocacy Starts Here
"We’ve all been advocates in our own way. Whether it was asking for a raise, standing up for your child’s needs, or sharing your opinion, we have all used our voices to influence change. Public health advocacy is no different. It’s about using your voice to create a healthier world for everyone.
Advocates have helped create big changes in public health. Because of them, we now have laws that make us wear seatbelts in cars, vaccines that stop us from getting sick, food labels that tell us what we’re eating and rules that keep smoke out of public places. These wins show how using our voices can make life better
and safer for everyone.
Using an equity lens can transform public health advocacy. When we listen to people who face the biggest health challenges and work to fix the deeper problems that cause poor health – like racism and unequal access to care – we create solutions that help all communities thrive." Learn more about this key priority area here!
Films:
- OYATE (2023) OYATE elevates the voices of Indigenous activists, organizers, and politicians as they offer their perspective on that complicated history, contextualize the #NoDAPL movement, illuminate the interconnectivity between the issues facing Indian Country today, and look towards a more sovereign and sustainable future for their people.
- Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009) Three years in the making, Crude tells the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet: the infamous $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” lawsuit pitting 30,000 rainforest dwellers in Ecuador against the U.S. oil giant Chevron.
- Theory And Practice: Conversations With Noam Chomsky And Howard Zinn (2010) Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky--converse with Sasha Lilley about their lives and political philosophies, looking back at eight decades of struggle and theoretical debate.
Graphic public health : a comics anthology and road mapISBN: 9780271093826Publication Date: 2022This book demonstrates how comics can address topics such as disease outbreaks, opioid addiction prevention, healthcare reform, and climate change while eliciting empathy, clarifying complexity, and broadening perspectives.
Queering Public Health and Public Policy in the Deep SouthISBN: 9781641139663Publication Date: 2020In this volume, authors explore the interconnected issues of public health and public policy as they relate to queer issues in the Deep South. The book begins with a sustained examination of public health, health disparities, and mental health for LGBTQ people in the South. Next, the issues of public policy and public advocacy, including law enforcement, community advocacy and activism, and public life in the Deep South are taken up.
Advocacy for Public Health Policy ChangeISBN: 9780875533131Publication Date: 2021Advocacy for Public Health Policy Change: An Urgent Imperative will be instrumental in training public health practitioners and students to turn their expertise into sound policies and laws. It will help these readers in these six key areas: Address the growing need to turn knowledge into better health policy. Offer a step-by-step planning and implementation framework for public health advocacy campaigns from start to finish. Improve Health Equity Expand professional development and satisfaction opportunities for the field. Improve service delivery. Improve health outcomes.
Slow CookedISBN: 9780520384163Publication Date: 2022Marion Nestle reflects on her late-in-life career as a world-renowned food politics expert, public health advocate, and a founder of the field of food studies after facing decades of low expectations. [...] Slow Cooked charts her astonishing rise from bench scientist to the pinnacles of academia, as she overcame the barriers and biases facing women of her generation and found her life's purpose after age fifty. Slow Cooked tells her personal story--one that is deeply relevant to everyone who eats, and anyone who thinks it's too late to follow a passion.
The Future of Public Health Starts Here
"A strong and resilient public health workforce is key to keeping communities healthy and addressing the nation’s most urgent health challenges. Public health professionals work hard to prevent disease, promote wellness and protect communities.
Investments in education and training can support the public health workforce. Efforts to build a workforce that includes people who are from all backgrounds and who have the skills to tackle health inequalities are helping improve access to health services, share important information, and build trust within communities. We must continue these efforts and more to ensure that public health systems are equipped to meet everyday health needs and respond to crises."
Learn more about this key priority area here!
Working in Public HealthISBN: 9781032169743Publication Date: 2023Public health has always been central to the population's health and wellbeing, and people working in public health come from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. This practical and accessible book maps out comprehensively the range of exciting and varied options open to those considering a career in public health. Uniquely, it provides helpful information on how to become either a fully-fledged specialist or to work in an operational practitioner role. This second edition provides an update on the variety of public health roles and the settings from which the workforce operates, with the inclusion of new material on climate change and sustainability. Written from a UK perspective, it nevertheless includes a chapter on working in international and global health. Each chapter is illustrated by career case studies and vignettes from people currently working in public health, illustrating their impact on improving or protecting the health of communities, as well as reducing inequalities. In an era when the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the spotlight on just how important public health roles are, this book should be essential reading for anyone aspiring to put public health at the heart of their own working life.
The Global Health CareerISBN: 9781421450926Publication Date: 2025An essential guide to navigating global health careers with strategies for planning, networking, skill mastery, and achieving personal and professional goals. In The Global Health Career, Sharon K. Rudy provides an indispensable resource for anyone passionate about making a difference in the field of international public health.
Ultimate InterviewISBN: 9781398602144Publication Date: 2021Don't let interview nerves get the better of you - present the best version of yourself and be ready for anything to wow your potential employer. Including hundreds of sample interview questions and answers to really help you nail it on the day, Ultimate Interview is the ideal tool to help you relax and show off your best side.
Leaving AcademiaISBN: 0691200203Publication Date: 2020An indispensable guide for grad students and academics who want to find fulfilling careers outside higher education An estimated ninety-three percent of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences won't get a tenure-track job, yet many still assume that a tenured professorship is the only successful outcome for a PhD. With the academic job market in such crisis, Leaving Academia helps grad students and academics in any scholarly field find satisfying careers beyond higher education. Short and pragmatic, the book offers invaluable advice to visiting and adjunct instructors ready to seek new opportunities, to scholars caught in "tenure-trap" jobs, to grad students interested in nonacademic work, and to committed academics who want to support their students and contingent colleagues more effectively. After earning a PhD in classics from the University of Virginia and teaching at Tulane, Christopher Caterine left academia for a job at a corporate consulting firm. During his career transition, he went on more than 150 informational interviews and later interviewed twelve other professionals who had left higher education for diverse fields. Drawing on everything he learned, Caterine helps readers chart their own course to a rewarding new career. He addresses dozens of key issues, including overcoming psychological difficulties, translating academic experience for nonacademics, and meeting the challenges of a first job in a new field. Providing clear, concrete ways to move forward at each stage of your career change, even when the going gets tough, Leaving Academia is both realistic and filled with hope.
Detroit Public Health Week 2025
Find more info here!
