A Story for Our Elders
Photo by André Ulysses De Salis
In this Library Chat, Will Harris, a writer and Fellow at the Institute who is working on a project about the public care system and its structuring tensions of race and class, interviews Faculty Visitor, PhD MPH and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, Paris “AJ” Adkins-Jackson on her latest endeavor: creating a musical to translate her epidemiological research on the adverse aging effects of structural racism. They discuss AJ’s artistic background, Will’s time spent at care homes in East London, and the challenges of multidisciplinary work.
Will Harris is the author of poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023). He has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. At the Institute, Harris will be working on a project about the public care system, looking at its structuring tensions: race, class, the family itself. It will draw on a diary kept over several months working in care homes in East London in the period immediately after the pandemic.
Paris “AJ” Adkins-Jackson, PhD MPH is a multidisciplinary community-partnered health equity researcher and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Dr. AJ’s research investigates the role of structural racism on healthy aging for historically marginalized populations like Black and Pacific Islander communities. Her primary project examines the role of life course adverse community-level policing exposure on psychological well-being, cognitive function, and biological aging for Black and Latinx/a/o older adults. Her secondary project tests the effectiveness of an anti-racist multilevel pre-intervention restorative program to increase community health and institutional trustworthiness through multisector community-engaged partnerships. Dr. AJ is an HBCU alumna of the psychometrics doctoral program at Morgan State University and a board member of the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues.
