The Ford Foundation has just approved funding for a two-year $500,000 collaborative project, “Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice,” based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and led by Aline Gubrium in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and Elizabeth Krause in the Department of Anthropology. The competitive proposal was submitted in response to the Ford Foundation’s Sexuality Research Initiative, “Sexuality, Health and Rights Among Youth in the United States: Transforming Public Policy and Public Understanding Through Social Science Research.”
Gubrium was a participant in the Center for Public Policy and Administration’s 2009-2010 grants workshop, an interdisciplinary fellowship program aimed at helping social sciences and public policy faculty develop effective grant proposals. Krause is a CPPA faculty associate, and CPPA Director M.V. Lee Badgett and Associate Director for Communications Michal Lumsden will sit on the “Hear Our Stories” advisory board.
“Hear Our Stories” involves six local, state and national partners, including the Care Center in Holyoke, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the Center for Digital Storytelling, the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy, the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at UMass Boston, and the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program at Hampshire College.
The project uses new media and sensory ethnography to reveal how diasporic youth experience and negotiate sexual health disparities, and prioritizes uprooted young parenting Latinas, whose material conditions and cultural worlds have placed them in tenuous positions, both socially constructed and experientially embodied. The aim is to transform assumptions about young parenting Latinas through the novel use of digital storytelling to recalibrate the conversation on young motherhood and sexuality, health, and rights across generations.
Research, training and strategic communication components are included. Four Ford Ph.D. fellows, four masters-level students, and youth participants will all have opportunities to participate in these components toward the goal of using social science research methods and collaborating with partners to analyze and transform the problem-oriented, stigmatizing discourse on young motherhood and youth sexuality.