Researcher and Advocate in Health Equity

In addition to being an assistant professor at the Center of Learning Innovation, I am University of Minnesota Rochester’s (UMR) Civic Engagement Scholar. In this dual role, I tap into my academic training and expertise in community-based participatory and action research to assist UMR students, faculty, staff, and senior leadership to foster sustainable, mutually beneficial partnerships and initiatives.  

CLI 2522 — Community Collaborative

Since UMR is “committ[ed] to empower students to be engaged citizens and collaborate with the local community to solve healthcare challenges” (UMR’s Public Engagement Action Plan, 2015), my role as an educator is to coordinate and teach CLI 2522–Community Collaborative (CoLab).  CoLab is an upper-level Community Engaged Learning (CEL) course at UMR that connects students, faculty, and community partners to develop projects that improve health outcomes (individual, social, community) in the Rochester community. Learn more about CLI 2522 from former UMR students.

CoLab invites students to cross borders and engage on an educational journey shaped by critical community engagement. As an ethos and practice, critical community engagement is not just the logic and practice of working towards an ideal of community change. Instead, to engage critically means to work alongside individuals and groups to understand, map out, and target unjust conditions that have disallowed communities from sustaining healthy and just futures.

CoLab introduces students to sets of knowledge, vocabularies, and methods and connects them to community-led opportunities that will help them develop practices as health science professionals that are consciously connected to the lifeworlds of the communities they serve. A pedagogical goal in CoLab, conscious connection helps students gain an awareness of how social issues manifest as health problems and introduces them to ways they can be accountable and intentional in their ongoing commitment to challenge structural, disciplinary, symbolic, and affective forms of oppression and dispossession. 

Refereed

Asterisk(*) – indicates student author

Mejia, Angie & Yuko Taniguchi. Art and Heart to Counter the One-hour-Zoom-diversity Event: Counterspaces as a response to diversity regimes in academia. Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society. [Forthcoming]

Mejia, Angie. “Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best, but Realistically, Expect a Combination of Both:” Lessons and Best Practices Emerging from Community-engaged Teaching During a Health Crisis. Journal of Higher Education Outreach & Engagement. [Forthcoming]

Dingel, Molly, Nichols, Marcia, Mejia, Angie, & Kristin Osiecki. (2021). “Service, Self-care, and Sacrifice: A Qualitative Exploration of the Pandemic University as a Greedy Institution.” ADVANCE Journal, 2(3).  doi: 10.5399/osu/ADVJRNL.2.3.2

Mejia, Angie, Chandi Katoch*, Fiza Khan*, Blake Peterson*, & Daniel Turin*. 2021. “Riding the Coronacoaster: Learning, Teaching, and Living at a Health Science Campus During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Anthropologica. 63(1). doi:10.18357/anthropologica6312021325

Mejia, Angie, Manami Bhattacharya*, Amanda Nigon-Crowley, Kelly R. Kirkpatrick, & Chandi Katoch*. 2020. “Community Gardening During Times of Crisis: Recommendations For Community-Engaged Dialogue, Research, And Praxis.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development,10(1):13–19. doi: 10.5304/jafscd.2020.101.006

Mejia, Angie. 2020. “Collaborative Autoethnography: An Approach to Deliver Learning Objectives of a Community-Engaged Research Course for Health Science Undergraduates during Pandemic Times.” Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research (SPUR), 4(1):72-73.

Mejia, Angie, Manami Bhattacharya, Joshua Miraglia, and The Village Community Garden and Learning Center. 2020. “Community Gardening as a Way to Build Cross-Cultural Community Resilience in Intersectionally-Diverse Gardeners: A Community-based Participatory Research and Campus-Community Partnered Proposal.” JMIR Research Protocols, 9(10): e21218. doi: 10.2196/21218

Mejia, Angie. 2020. “White Apathy and Pedagogical Renegotiations: An Autohistoria-teoría of Teaching while Sick, Tired, and Brown.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 16(3). doi: 10.31235/osf.io/93c58.

Mejia, Angie. 2020. “Community-Engaged Learning in Times of COVID-19, Or, Why I’m Not Prepared to Transition My Class into an Online Environment.” Public Philosophy Journal (PPJ) 3(1). doi: 10.25335/ppj.3.1-3

Mejia, Angie P. 2019. “Joven, Extranjera, y Deprimida en América: Ruminations of an Immigrant to Prozac Nation.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 19(4):243-255. doi.org/10.1177/1532708618807245

Nguyen, Nicole, A. W. Nastasi, Angie Mejia, Anya Stanger, Meredith Madden. (Postscript by Chandra Tapalde Mohanty). 2016. “Epistemic Friendships: Collective Knowledges and Feminist Praxis.” Pp. 11-42 in Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and the Possibility of Transnational Solidarities, edited by E.H. Chowdhury, and L. Philipose. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois press.

Mejia, Angie P. 2015. “You Better Check Your Method Before You Wreck Your Method: Challenging and Transforming Photovoice.” Pp. 665-672 in The SAGE Handbook of Action Research, edited by H. Bradbury-Huang. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Zuckerman, Katharine E., Brianna Sinche, Martiza Cobian, Marlene Cervantes, Angie Mejia, Thomas Becker and Christina Nicolaidis. 2014. “Conceptualization of Autism in the Latino Community and its Relationship with Early Diagnosis.“ Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 35(8):522.

Zuckerman, Katharine E., Brianna Sinche, Angie Mejia, Martiza Cobian, Thomas Becker and Christina Nicolaidis. 2014. “Latino Parents’ Perspectives on Barriers to Autism Diagnosis.“ Academic Pediatrics 14(3):301-308.

Wahab, Stéphanie, Jammie Trimble, Angie Mejia, S. R. Mitchell, Mary J. Thomas, Vanessa Timmons, A. S. Waters, Dora Raymaker and Christina Nicolaidis. 2014. “Motivational Interviewing at the Intersections of Depression and Intimate Partner Violence among African American Women.“ Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work 11(3):291-303.

Nicolaidis, Christina, Stephanie Wahab, Jammie Trimble, Angie P. Mejia, S. R. Mitchell, Dora Raymaker, Mary J. Thomas, Vanessa Timmons and A. S. Waters. 2013. “The Interconnections Project: Development and Evaluation of a Community-Based Depression Program for African American Violence Survivors.“ Journal of General Internal Medicine 28(4):530-8.

Nicolaidis, Christina, Mejia, Angie P., Perez, Marlen, Alvarado, Aanaberta, Celaya-Alston, Rosemary, Quintero, Yolanda, & Aguillon, Raquel. 2013. “Proyecto Interconexiones: A Pilot-test of a Community-based Depression Care Program for Latina Violence Survivors.” Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, 7(4): 395-401. 

Mejia, Angie P., Olivia Quiroz, Yolanda Morales, Ruth Ponce, Graciela L. Chavez and Elizabeth Olivera y Torre. 2013. “From Madres to Mujeristas: Latinas Making Change with Photovoice.“ Action Research 11(4):301-321.

Mejia, Angie P. 2011. “Writing from Un Lugar Negro: A Call Towards Healing Fantasmas Chingadas.“ Theory in Action 4(3).

Nicolaidis, Christina, Marlen Perez, Angie P. Mejia, Anabertha Alvarado, Rosemary Celaya-Alston, Hilary Galian and Anandam Hilde. 2011. “‘Guardarse Las Cosas Adentro’ (Keeping Things Inside): Latina Violence Survivors’ Perceptions of Depression.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 26(10):1131-7

Nicolaidis, Christina, Vanessa Timmons, Mary J. Thomas, A. S. Waters, Stephanie Wahab, Angie P. Mejia and S. R. Mitchell. 2010. “‘You Don’t Go Tell White People Nothing’: African American Women’s Perspectives on the Influence of Violence and Race on Depression and Depression Care.“ American Journal of Public Health 100(8):1470-6.

Everett, Margaret, Angie P. Mejia and Olivia Quiroz. 2009. “Building Evidence to Prevent Childhood Obesity: Lessons from the Portland Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL) Coalition.“ Practicing Anthropology 31(4):21-26.

Research Briefs

Mejia, Angie P., Mary Kate Lee and Shannon Monnat. 2019. “An Apple a Day Keeps Diabetes at Bay:  Incentivizing Participation in a Diabetes Self-Management with Fruit & Vegetable Vouchers.” Population Health Brief Series. Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion. Syracuse University, NY.

Reports

Merrick, Meg and Angie P. Mejia. 2010. “PhotoVoice as Authentic Civic Engagement: Lessons Learned in One Immigrant Community.” Paper 138. Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Publications. Portland, OR.

Opinion

Mejia, Angie and Chandi Katoch*. 2020. “Opinion: Policing is a Broken and Rotten System.” Rochester, Minnesota: MedCity Beat. https://www.medcitybeat.com/opinion/2020/policing-is-a-broken-and-rotten-system

Blogs

Mejia, Angie. 2013. Our Photovoice Journey: An Act of Exhausting Bravery. Action Research Plus.

Mejia, Angie. 2021. Dear White Scholar I’ve Never Met…. A Women of Color in Academia Guest Post. The Professor is In. https://theprofessorisin.com/2021/05/05/dear-white-scholar-a-bipoc-scholar-guest-post/

MENTAL HEALTH INEQUITIES

My book project, Las Lloronas: Depresión, Mujeres, and the Sociological Imagination, stands at the intersection of lived experience and the various discourses about depression in the lives of U.S. Latinx women of Mexican descent. I argue that depression is part of a genealogy of a complex interplay of emotional states, U.S. hegemonic femininities and other, often-contradictory, gendered impositions, collective sentiments rooted in specific socio-historical contexts, and struggles and anxieties of embodying intersectional subjectivities. This critical approach positions depression as an affective and embodied response to social dispossession, as well as a practice of continually reflecting on the source of one’s psychological pain. Inspired by Anzaldua’s (1987) call to create nuevas teorias (new theories) to better frame experiences defined by the multiple crossing of fronteras, Las Lloronas analyzes the meanings and interpretations of emotional distress attached to depression, and not just experiences associated with its’ biomedicalized conceptualization. In five data chapters, Las Lloronas puts forward a conceptual model that examines depression as an affective and embodied positionality and practice. Each chapter outlines a component of this model to illuminate the roles various social mechanisms have in shaping the experience of depression.

ARTS-BASED RESEARCH (ABR) METHODS IN HEALTH SCIENCES EDUCATION

I am overseeing several community-engaged projects* that incorporate arts-based research methods to examine various socio-cultural inequities in various communities in the Rochester, MN area.

In collaboration with Professor Yuko Taniguchi: One of these projects — Counterspaces — is a community participatory art collaboration between the University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR) and the Rochester Art Center (RAC). The idea of Counterspaces emerged from our experiences as Women of Color scholars and educators providing emotional support (via art-based activities) to our Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) and Black and other People of Color (BIPOC) students in response to our proximity to racialized violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) and Black and other People of Color (BIPOC) in our state of Minnesota. The artwork highlighted in this current year-long exhibit was and continues to be created by UMR and UMN BIPOC students.

*Some of these research activities are supported by funds from the Office of Community Engagement to Advance Research and Community Health (CEARCH), Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI)’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (Award Number UL1TR002494.)

COMMUNITY-ENGAGED LEARNING

In collaboration with The Village Community Garden and Learning Center, I am the principal academic investigator on a campus-community participatorylearning initiative to understand the role of organized garden projects in decreasing food insecurity and facilitating resilience in diverse groups in Rochester. Using a mixed-method approach, we are examining the experiences of two communities in Rochester: current and new growers with VCGLC plots, and University of Minnesota-Rochester (UMR) students who currently supplement their vegetable and fruit intake with the help of the student food pantry. The community garden serves as a community learning laboratory for several UMR initiatives.

This research is supported by funds from the University of Minnesota’s Healthy Foods Healthy Lives Institute (Grant Number 20FCUR-2YR50AM).

I envision teaching as an act of nepantlerismo–a Nahuatl term used by Gloria Anzaldúa to describe someone who straddles two worlds and builds bridges between them. Her works, the works of various feminist theorists of color, and my own academic mentors have shaped my teaching practice. As an educator I want to encourage students to serve as puentes (bridges) using social theory to create a more just world.

The classroom is not only a place for students to examine their daily lives but a stage to foster and nurture a healthy critique of academic disciplines and practices. In this place, and on this stage, I guide students to:

1. Apply theories and methods to assess, challenge, and transform the logic and practices of knowledge production inside and outside of the academy. Social theory has provided many with the framework to decipher and act in times of profound uncertainty. I have designed my curriculum to equip students to use sets of knowledge to transform our current social moment. 
2. Center the contributions made by individuals and communities who are not usually recognized or considered valid by those in the mainstream. I achieve this by exposing students to theoretical and methodological gaps in academic texts and guiding them to fill those exclusions with Global South scholarship and subaltern communities’ sabidurias (wisdom), conocimientos (knowledge), and expertise.
3. Value their own and others’ experiential knowledge and its role in creating social theory. I empower students to reflect on how personal experiences have the same epistemological power as any other set of existing discourses. I ask studets to remain “critically vigilant” (hooks 2003) regarding the ways that social positionality influences knowledge creation and dissemination. 
4. Restructure the concepts and practices of social justice and collective responsibility towards the creation of a “mundo … donde quepan muchos mundos (a world where many other worlds may fit in)” (EZLN 1994). I encourage students to connect with different groups, assess existing paradigms and practices, honor new ideas, and empower others to engage in transforming society at large.

hooks, b. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. NY: Routledge

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN.) 1994. Segunda Declaración de la Selva Lacandona. Chapas, Mexico.Web