Ayesha McAdams-Mahmoud is a fourth year doctoral student in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences. In this Q & A she shares what led her to SBS and about a pilot study she developed on interactions between police officers and youth in Alameda County, California.
Ayesha, can you tell us what initially sparked your interest in health communication and public health?
I’ve always been fascinated with the ways stories and the expressive arts get under people’s skin. I grew up doing a lot of songwriting, acting, and eventually journalism, so each of those experiences taught me to treat stories not only as nuanced pieces of data, but also as meaning-making opportunities that really affect the ways we view ourselves and interact with the world around us. Consequently, storytelling has been a big part of my work in public health. I’ve led qualitative and mixed methods research initiatives in the academic and nonprofit sectors on topics like HIV prevention, intimate partner violence, and women’s empowerment. I came to this program to expand my experiences in health communication, improve my toolbox of research methods, and see if it was possible to measure the health impact of art.
How did your experiences lead you to design an intervention project with police officers?
Though I wrote about wanting to use art and storytelling to promote mental health when I applied to this school, I didn’t know I wanted to work with police and communities of color until a few months before I started my coursework. At the time, I was leading a program at Johns Hopkins, and happened to be living 3 blocks from where Freddie Gray was killed by police. After seeing how the stories of low-income young people of color were systematically ignored by police, I knew I wanted the intervention to take place between kids and cops.
Can you describe the goals of the intervention?
My project was about improving the quality of interactions between police and urban teens, who have the greatest odds of negative run-ins with cops. I used Community-based participatory research (CBPR) and an experimental study design to test whether a 90-minute storytelling workshop could increase trust and empathy for both groups over time. The workshops included restorative practices, expressive writing, and perspective-taking. It’s pretty rare for researchers to use experimental methods and storytelling with mixed groups of cops and kids, and also to consider the mental health implications of their interactions. I’m not naïve enough to think this is going to solve all the longstanding, systemic issues with law enforcement, but the study results are promising in terms of the workshop’s associations with more equitable interactions and lower social prejudice.
Finally, can you name three courses that provided training you needed to develop this project?
Well, my best preparation came from my community partners and advisers. In terms of courses, I gained a lot from Dr. Viswanath’s “Health Communication in the 21st Century” (SBS 509), which gave me a great foundation for framing social issues with a public health lens. And Dr. Williams’s class on “Reducing Socioeconomic & Racial/Ethnic Inequalities in Health” (SBS 514) proved very helpful for introducing me to real-world examples of applied public health. Finally, I really valued the opportunity to take courses outside the school such as “Transformative Justice: From Classroom to Cellblock to Community” (EDU T416) with Dr. Kaia Stern.
