Community Engagement
Partnering with People with Lived Experience
Alisa Lincoln & Suzanne Gaverich
The Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research (IHESJR) will support the BTI in developing a multi-year strategy to increase community engagement across multiple trauma related research projects. As a first step, in years 1 and 2, the IHESJR will lead the development of training modules to facilitate this process. Participatory research practices require early efforts to include cross-training of diverse team members which facilitates community/trust building and supports the full participation of team members in all aspects of the research process. Such cross-trainings allow community members to train academic partners in their areas of expertise and knowledge, including those from lived-experience and, conversely, academic partners can share aspects of their professional roles. In turn, the academic partners provide training in their expertise including the state of knowledge of the area of inquiry, in this case trauma research, the wide range of research methods that are used to study trauma, and principles of ethical research practice. Dr. Lincoln and her teams have developed similar curricula across multiple projects that have supported the inclusion of people with lived-experience in research. Examples of such efforts have included engaging: firearms owners in research to increase understanding of how firearms owners think about and understand suicide prevention efforts to improve suicide prevention for firearms owners; young adults living with serious mental illness who experience housing instability to understand how housing impacts health; and engaging high school students who had previously participated in a middle-school dating violence prevention program in the design and conduct of an evaluation of that prevention program.
The IHESJR will lead the development of a curriculum, partnered with people with lived experience with trauma, which can be engaged across multiple trauma related research projects and provide an entry point to increasing community engagement in research. The curriculum will include state of the art knowledge of trauma research, informed by the diverse expertise at the Broad and the BTI network, research methods engaged in trauma research including innovative approaches, and an introduction to the ethical conduct of research. The curriculum will be designed for implementation with a diverse group of stakeholders and will be attentive to the needs of people with a wide range of educational backgrounds, literacy levels, and experience and knowledge of research.
Alisa Lincoln, Northeastern University
Alisa K. Lincoln, MPH, PhD, is an Interdisciplinary Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences and Director of the Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research at Northeastern University and the co-founder of the Northeastern University Public Evaluation Lab (NU-PEL). Her research examines the way that multiple forms of social exclusion and marginalization, including racism and stigma, both contribute to and are consequences of poor health, and specifically mental health. She examines questions related to social factors and their relationships with mental health and mental health services focusing on how social disadvantage impacts people’s mental health and their experiences and outcome in mental health care. Her work has examined public mental health services, racial and ethnic disparities and health, and literacy and health. She continues to develop innovative models by which we can increase the inclusion of communities and stakeholders in the process of research and the co-creation of knowledge, and has led some of the first federally funded studies exploring the use of Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPR) in mental health care. Her multiple research teams also prioritize the inclusion of students through a shared mentorship approach including undergraduates, master’s level, doctoral level and post-doctoral students. She has over 25 years of continuous research funding from sources including NIMH, NIMHD, SAMHSA, NIJ, RWJF, and other funders.
BTI Artist-in-Residence Program
Allison Maria Rodriguez
This project contains two aspects: first, the conceptual and logistical development of an ongoing Artist-in-Residence program for the BTI and secondly the development and exhibition of a multimedia art project. This is a two-year proposal to allow time for the development of the structure and functionality of the AiR position in preparation for future artists while also piloting the program with my BTI project.
The art project is a multimedia art installation focused on the power of creativity and the imagination in overcoming trauma. It is a new iteration of a previously successful project entitled “Legends Breathe” in which I conducted interviews with different artists about childhood fantasies that assisted them in overcoming trauma. I then created individual multimedia videos (using an assortment of mediums & techniques including: green screen video, on-location video, drawing, digitally generated imagery, photography, performance, sculpture, collage, etc) exploring those fantasies and exhibited them together as an immersive installation, highlighting their uniqueness, their commonalities, and their inherent power. I would like to utilize the same general strategy but based on interviews with scientists rather than artists. Over the years I have done residencies and volunteer work with scientists and have been inspired by the similarities in processes of “making” both science and art. Curiosity, exploration, strategy, uncertainty, play, failure - and perhaps most importantly an openness to the unknown - are integral to the results and the making of both science and art. The project overall not only speaks to creativity as a methodology for survival, but also as a potential outcome from the experience of trauma. It is my theory that enhanced creativity is sometimes a direct result of the fact that the experience of trauma exists outside of language, and thereby outside of traditional methods of communication. I also see fantasy and play as skill sets in the project of social and environmental justice movements, as we need to imagine the world differently in order to make it different. “Legends Breathe” celebrates the imaginative and the creative as powerful tools of social change. This project would also highlight that creativity is not only a skill utilized by artists, but by scientists as well.
Allison Maria Rodriguez, Interdisciplinary Artist
Allison Maria Rodriguez is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in video installation and new media. She creates immersive experiential spaces that challenge conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. Her work focuses extensively on climate change, species extinction and the interconnectivity of existence. Through video, performance, digital animation, photography, drawing, collage and installation, Rodriguez merges and blends mediums to create new pictorial spaces for aesthetic, emotional and conceptual exploration. She uses art to communicate beyond language – to open up a space of possibility for the viewer to encounter alternative ways of connecting to the emotional realities of others.
Rodriguez received her MFA from Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts and holds a BA in Language, Literature and Culture from Antioch College in OH, obtained also through study at Oxford University in England and Kyoto Seika University in Japan. She has taught courses in art theory and media production in a variety of contexts, from universities to children’s museums. Rodriguez is also an independent curator, with exhibitions such as “Awaken: Conjuring Our Tomorrow” (Salem State University, 2020) featuring Latina artists focusing on climate justice issues in their practice. Rodriguez is the 2023 International Guest Artist-in-Residence at Digital Arts Studios in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has also been a resident at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, the Ragdale Foundation, the Dorchester Art Project (inaugural resident), Wassaic Project, Arts Letters & Numbers, and The Studios at MASS MoCA. She has her studio at Midway Artist Studios in Boston, MA.
Rodriguez’s work has been exhibited internationally, throughout the country and extensively in the New England area, in both traditional and non-traditional art spaces. Her immersive and/or large-scale installations have been exhibited in venues such as the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Montserrat Gallery, Smack Mellon, Fitchburg Art Museum, Gallery 360 at Northeastern University, Emerson Contemporary, Milton Academy, Installation Space, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Blockfort Gallery, Spoke Gallery, 13Forest Gallery, Fountain Street Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston Children’s Museum, and Dorchester Art Project, among others. Her projects also include several public art video installations commissioned by organizations such as Illuminus Boston, Boston Cyberarts, the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, and the Jewish Arts Collaborative.
Her work has been supported by grants from The Boston Foundation, Mass Cultural Council, The Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Red Bull Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CreateWell Fund, Boston Cultural Council, Arlington Cultural Council, Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation and Assets for Artists. Rodriguez is a Brother Thomas Fellow (2021-22) of The Boston Foundation, and has also been awarded an Earthwatch Communications Fellowship (2018) and the grand prize at the Creative Climate Awards (2017). In 2019 she was honored by WBUR’s The ARTery as one of “The ARTery 25”, an inaugural celebration of 25 creatives of color impacting Boston’s arts and culture scene.
