Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #119269

Lynn Weber, PhD, Women's Studies Program, University of South Carolina, Flinn Hall, Columbia, SC 29223, 803-777-4007, weberl@sc.edu

In the last forty years, the biomedical paradigm — and the psychosocial and biobehavioral approaches that emulate it — have continually dominated health science funding, research, and policy despite the paradigm's almost negligible impact on reducing health disparities of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and gender. During that same period, feminist scholarship on the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of difference made significant advances in knowledge about the nature and consequences of these systems of social inequality. Yet feminist intersectional research as well as other critical public health approaches to health disparities (e.g., community-based participatory action research; ecological frameworks, technoscience, social capital) remain largely marginalized in health science, in research funding, and in public policy.

In part the marginalization of these critical perspectives is the outcome of power struggles over what questions are asked and prioritized; what constitutes evidence; how we assess evidence; and how evidence is translated and related to practice and action.

My aims in this presentation are to highlight the potential contributions of feminist intersectional approaches to understanding and eliminating health disparities; to compare feminist intersectional scholarship's common orientations to evidence with those of the dominant biomedical paradigm; to identify some promising areas of convergence among dominant biomedical, feminist intersectional, and other critical public health paradigms; and to suggest ways to facilitate a more balanced and effective engagement among these paradigms toward the common goal of eliminating health disparities.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of the presentation, the participant will be able to (
• distinguish between the biomedical and feminist intersectional approaches to health disparities research and (
• identify different orientations to evidence taken by feminist intersectional and related critical public health paradigms and the biomedical paradigm.

Keywords: Health Disparities, Women's Health

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation