SEARCHNARRATIVE_REVIEWpublic health, epidemiology

narrative_review·public health, epidemiology, pediatrics, psychiatry, research methods·PMC10022030

You can’t report your feelings: The hidden labor of managing threats to safety by women in global public health fieldwork

PLOS Global Public Health · 7 authors, 3 centres

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This phenomenological study used in-depth interviews and guided writing exercises to explore the lived experiences of 25 women graduate students from the U.S. and Canada during global public health fieldwork. This labor involved strategies to manage people, situations, and their own mindset but often remained invisible and unreported. The study suggests this experience is distinct and inequitable compared to male peers.

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narrative_review

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public health

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AI pipeline

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ORIGINAL PAPER

PMC10022030

You can’t report your feelings: The hidden labor of managing threats to safety by women in global public health fieldwork

PLOS Global Public Health

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ABSTRACT

Abstract Increasing job market demand for and availability of Canadian and U.S. global academic health programs in post-secondary education increases student demand to participate in internationally based fieldwork, while supportive resources remain weakly developed. Previous studies indicate provisions to protect the health, safety, and well-being of women students remain inadequately addressed during training, while more research to identify needs, expectations, gaps, and best practices would inform policy and practice to improve conditions for women working off-campus on global public health studies. One approach, reported here, is to document and better understand the lived experience of U.S. or Canadian women graduate students participating in global public health fieldwork. Participant in-depth phenomenological interviews and guided writing exercises aimed to capture lived experience descriptions for 25 women. A phenomenology of practice was applied throughout the research process, following Max van Manen’s qualitative methodology approach. Loss of environmental familiarity, combined with graduate students’ lack of power, created considerable hidden labor described by women in working to keep themselves safe from sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) while participating in global public health fieldwork. Women shared specific experiences exemplifying how this can be both alleviated and/or intensified through a range of negotiated strategies, coping styles, and management techniques. Additionally, women recalled laboring as students to avoid or reduce instances of SGBV, that then, precluded them from having any material “of substance” to report once returned home. These findings offer new meaning structures, language for a foreign experience, or ways to describe, conceive of, and respond to global public health fieldwork that hold the potential to positively affect individuals’ experiences, institutional understanding, and thus practice, of future women students in global public health.

CITATION EXPORT

Corey McAuliffe, Ross Upshur, Daniel Sellen et al.. You can’t report your feelings: The hidden labor of managing threats to safety by women in global public health fieldwork. PLOS Global Public Health. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0000153

AUTHORS

7 · 3 CENTRES

Corey McAuliffe, Ross Upshur, Daniel Sellen, Erica Di Ruggiero, Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra, Julia Robinson, Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra

1Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
2Joannah and Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
3The University of Edinburgh College of Arts Humanities and Social Science, UNITED KINGDOM