Food, Taste, and the Body: Ingestion and Embodiment in Santiago de Cuba.

Using a Black feminist embodied approach, this article analyzes the ways in which people in Santiago de Cuba draw on their own embodied practices, sensory experiences, and popular knowledge to determine what forms of ingestion (food, drink, etc.) are good for the body. Influenced by historical ideals of food consumption and colonial entanglements, Cubans use a combination of knowledge gleaned from biomedicine, official nutrition guidelines, and humoral medicine, which are not always in agreement, to ensure that they are taking care of their bodies appropriately. In addition to these external sources, they also continuously assess their own embodied responses to ingestion (e.g., pain, illness, headaches, or other bodily sensations) to determine which foods and drinks should be consumed. Practices of healthy ingestion may also vary between people and circumstance, which people learn over time and from one another, layering on another interpersonal dimension of embodied knowledge. [Cuba, food, embodiment, health, ingestion].

Duoethnography as Transformative Praxis: Conversations about Nourishment and Coercion in the COVID-Era Academy.

This article introduces the feminist praxis of duoethnography as a way to examine the COVID era. As a group of diverse, junior, midcareer, and senior feminist scholars, we developed a methodology to critically reflect on our positions in our institutions and social worlds. As a method, duoethnography emphasizes the dialogical intimacy that can form through anthropological work. While autoethnography draws on individual daily lives to make sense of sociopolitical dynamics, duoethnography emphasizes the relational character of research across people and practices. Taking the relational aspects of knowledge production seriously, we conceptualized this praxis as a transformative method for facilitating radical empathy, mobilizing our collective voice, and merging together our partial truths. As collective authors, interviewers, and interlocutors of this article, the anonymity of duoethnography allows us to vocalize details of the experience of living through COVID-19 that we could not have safely spoken about publicly or on our own.

On the limitations of barriers: Social visibility and weight management in Cuba and Samoa.

Obesity is an enduring global health challenge. Researchers have struggled to understand the barriers and facilitators of weight loss. Using a cross-cultural comparative approach, we move away from a barriers approach to analyze obesity and overweight through the lens of social visibility to understand the persistent failure of most obesity interventions. Drawing on ethnographic data from Cuba and Samoa collected between 2010 and 2017, we argue that social visibility is a framework for analyzing some of the reasons why people do not participate in weight management programs when they have high rates of health literacy and access to free or low-cost programming. Comparing these two places with very different histories of obesity interventions, we trace how weight management practices make people socially visible (in positive and negative ways), specifically analyzing how gender and economic inequalities shape the sociality of obesity. Our findings show that regardless of barriers and facilitators of weight loss at an individual and population level, the ways weight loss activities are incorporated into or conflict with the social dynamics of everyday life can have a profound effect on weight management. Employing visibility as a analytic framework de-individualizes weight responsibility, providing a contextual way to understand the difficulties people face when they manage their weight.

Understanding Faculty and Trainee Needs Related to Scholarly Activity in a Large, Nonuniversity Graduate Medical Education Program.

CONTEXT: Graduate medical education (GME) programs must develop curriculum to ensure scholarly activity among trainees and faculty to meet accreditation requirements and to support evidence-based medicine. OBJECTIVE: Test whether research-related needs and interests varied across four groups: primary care trainees, specialty trainees, primary care faculty, and specialty faculty. DESIGN: We surveyed a random sample of trainees and faculty in Kaiser Permanente Southern California's GME programs. We investigated group differences in outcomes using Fisher exact and Kruskal-Wallis tests. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Research experiences, skills, barriers, motivators, and interests in specific research skills development. RESULTS: Participants included 47 trainees and 26 faculty (response rate = 30%). Among primary care faculty, 12 (71%) reported little or no research experience vs 1 (11%) for specialty faculty, 14 (41%) for primary care trainees, and 1 (8%) for specialty trainees (p < 0.001). Submission of research to the institutional review board, an abstract to a conference, or a manuscript for publication in the previous year varied across groups (p = 0.001, p = 0.003, and p < 0.001, respectively). Overall self-reported research skills also differed across groups (p < 0.001). Primary care faculty reported the lowest skill level. Research barriers that differed across groups included other work roles taking priority; desire for work-life balance; and lack of managerial support, research equipment, administrative support, and funding. CONCLUSION: Faculty and trainees in primary care and specialties have differing research-related needs that GME programs should consider when designing curricula to support scholarly activity. Developing research skills of primary care faculty is a priority to support trainees' scholarly activity.