Canadian Professor Discusses Health Policy

Olena Hankivsky, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada joined an intimate group of undergraduates and graduate students for a discussion about the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender and class in health research and social policy yesterday.

The informal session was organized by Laurie A. Nsiah-Jefferson, a lecturer on Women, Gender and Sexuality, who teaches courses on race and gender. Nsiah-Jefferson said that she invited Hankivsky to Harvard after hearing her talk about her work at a conference a year ago.

“I drew a lot of my inspiration [for my class] from Olena,” she said. “I really wanted students, faculty, and staff to hear her perspective on intersectionality and be able to talk about it from the policy as well as research perspective.”

Hankivsky, who is also the founder and co-director of Institute for Critical Studies of Gender and Health, said that the concept of intersectionality should also be applied to health research and social policy, not just the social sciences and the humanities.

She spoke about intersectionality as an all-encompassing approach that weaves together factors such as gender, class, race, and other determinants of health to help scholars better understand public health problems and enable them to better craft long-term solutions.

But Hankivsky said that she commonly encounters resistance to this approach from other researchers who believe that it is too ambiguous to be applied to practical research questions.

“Everyone acknowledges that intersectionality is on the table,” Hankivsky said. “But in the same breath they say there needs to be a pragmatism to research.”

Hankivsky co-authored a recently released primer by the Women’s Health Research Network entitled “Intersectionality: Moving Women’s Health Research and Policy Forward,” which she likened to an “Intersectionality for Dummies” guide for health researchers, scholars, and policy makers who want to apply the paradigm to their work.

Candance B. Samuel ’12, who attended the event, said that she enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about the research process.

“It’s helped me connect the dots more with what I’m learning in school and as it applies to actual research in public health. So it was very informative,” she said.