Bridging the Gap between Evidence and Policy

Heather Tucker recently joined the Center for Global Health Equity as an Impact Scholar. Tucker is an anthropologist and feminist ethnographer. She has done extensive work in gender studies and is refining the application of feminist participatory methods in low- and middle-income settings.

As an Impact Scholar, Tucker is working with the School of Public Health’s Resilience + Resistance Collective and the Western Kenya LBQT Feminist Forum (WKLFF).

As Tucker continues to support these important interdisciplinary collaborations with colleagues on campus, across Michigan, and in Kenya, we wanted to learn more about her perspectives on global health and how feminist methodologies can advance health equity.

Where did you grow up and what first got you interested in pursuing a career in health sciences?

I’m originally from a small town in rural Missouri. As a Gender Studies major at the University of Missouri, I studied abroad in Ghana—and have been interested in living and working in sub-Saharan Africa since. I focused my domestic activist work on sexual and gender-based violence and began my career working as a case manager in the field of intimate partner violence response in California.

I entered a master’s program after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, when UN agencies failed to follow the lead of local Haitian survivor organizations to respond to sexual and gender-based violence. I realized then that I wanted to work as a feminist researcher and advocate, to help enact change in situations like this where local communities and their knowledge have so much to offer but either lack resources for implementation or are altogether ignored or invisibilized in policy and practice.

What is your main field of study and why did you choose it?

I am a gender studies student and scholar through and through, up to and including my PhD in Gender Comparative Studies. I chose gender studies instead of nursing because, as a queer-identified woman, I felt more connected to the subject matter.

Producing knowledge by and for those experiencing various forms of oppression can help us create more equitable societies that serve everyone.

I was also drawn to the idea of various queer and feminist political philosophies and theories, which are essentially frameworks for thinking about power and inequality. Women and queer people of color from the US and from the global south have developed and enhanced these frameworks.

I love the idea of being able to use these frameworks in practice and research to shape culture, policy, and—ideally—to create social change and have a positive impact on health.

What has been your biggest challenge in succeeding as an academic?

As a first generation academic, I struggle with the understanding that I belong in academia as much as anyone else. It has also been challenging to navigate the academic pressure to publish or perish when, as a feminist academic, I prefer to produce work and research that is first and foremost ethical as well as genuinely useful not only in academia but for communities and policymaking.

What is the central driving passion in your work and how did you arrive at this motivation?

Producing knowledge by and for those experiencing various forms of oppression can help us create more equitable societies that serve everyone. This includes focusing on the rights of all communities not only to have access to health but to be free from discrimination and stigma that may be barriers to health and well-being.

Understanding a community’s context leads to a better understanding of the historical and socioeconomic oppressions faced by individuals in that community. This understanding supports the creation of informed, on-going community-led initiatives which ultimately lead to sustainable, decolonial forms of social change from the ground up. This feminist anthropologist and intersectional approach is a method or framework aimed at redistributing power, resources, and access to health for all.

What methods do you use and how do they work to improve health?

I center my work around intersectional and feminist methods.

Intersectional refers to a method developed by US-based Black feminist and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.¹ An intersectional approach looks at power and the various ways it intersects in our lives—how we are affected by the social categories of gender, gender identity and expression, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, ethnicities, class, race, ability and so on and how these different social categories might affect access to human rights, including health and well-being. Intersectional thinking can inform every step of a research process, from design to analysis to distribution.

A feminist methodology embeds the research process in the deconstruction and redistribution of power. Feminist methods also focus on the lived experience of lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and gender-non-conforming (LBQTBNC) persons who are assigned female at birth. The feminist notion is that this lived experience provides critical, valuable data that can help create changes in access to health for this community.

Using both methods, we are co-developing studies with and for LBQTBNC persons in Kenya to create social change that addresses the oppression experienced by this group.

My current work is with the Resilience + Resistance Collective and the Western Kenya LBQT Feminist Forum (WKLFF). For both, we use feminist participatory methods, meaning all partners are part of

• deciding which projects to pursue;
• assessing the needs of LBQTBNC persons assigned female at birth in Western Kenya;
• filling the research or data gap and producing evidence using the lived experiences of LBQTBNC persons with their full knowledge and consent;
• developing, designing, and analyzing research used for action, intervention, and policy;
• and bringing research back to the community in the form of advocacy materials, etc.

Our ultimate goal is to bridge the gap between evidence and policy. When we further develop the knowledge and skills of the LBQTBNC community, it directly increases their quality of life and supports their policy goals aimed at improving equity and quality of life for the entire community. This requires providing research-based evidence to advance those policies and build advocacy movements to help pass them into law.

Where have you seen your findings translate into impact?

Using feminist participatory methodologies in our research challenges our own power and privilege as researchers from the global north, the global north/south divide in research and in health and enables LBQTNC leaders in Kenya to develop their capabilities and strengths to carry out community-based research themselves.

We know from our community partners that mental health is a critical concern in Kenya at a time when the current legal context includes potential increases in the criminalization of the LGBTIQ+ community.

With our WKLFF partners, we are conducting in western Kenya a survey about empowerment that has been met with enthusiasm and high rates of participation. As we gather crucial data on the lived experiences of LBQTBNC persons in East Africa, we have heard from several participants that the survey “exceeded their expectations.”

Once we analyze these responses from the community, we will use the data to inform policy demands and to advocate for protections and interventions for LBQTNC persons in Kenya. This will be the first data set of its kind, and it was designed to be easily adapted for future studies with LBQTNC persons in sub-Saharan Africa to inform policies and programs.

We hope to exceed even our own expectations as we look to the power of evidence to create more equitable policy for all.

1. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989/1.