Displaced Children: "Adverse Childhood Experiences Amongst Refugees from the Horn of Africa: Influences on Development, Attachment, and Risk/Resilience"
by Segen Zeray
Fall 2022 Global Health + Reproductive Rights
The number of people battling for their reproductive rights across the US is increasing due to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the national legalization of abortion. Within the US, people in marginalized communities bear the brunt of this decision that is expected to accelerate impoverished conditions, since power and privilege influence access to reproductive health care. Access to safe reproductive health care is a challenge of global importance. People within vulnerable communities across the globe are burdened by threats made to their reproductive health, even though we're all owed the basic human right to have the power and resources to make decisions in all aspects of life, including our bodies. Join us for a discussion on reproductive justice in global health. Resources will be provided at the end of the event.
The UC San Diego Global Health Program and Students for Global Health held our eighteenth event in Quarterly Conversations in Global Health on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022, at the Great Hall at I-House! This quarter’s panel spoke to the topic of reproductive health and rights.
Quarterly Conversations provides a forum for the Global Health community to come together to discuss relevant issues in the field from an interdisciplinary perspective and increase community interaction at UC San Diego.
Thank you to the community tables who participated in the event’s networking session: Students for Global Health, Center for Global Mental Health, Health & Anti-Recidivism Project, and Planned Parenthood Generation Action.
We would like to give our special appreciation to our event co-sponsors: Aya Healthcare, UC San Diego Global Health Institute, UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences, UC San Diego Global Health Program, UC San Diego Center for Global Mental Health, UC San Diego Students for Global Health, and the UC San Diego International House.
Panel Recap
We were delighted to have Dr. Thomas Csordas, Director of UC San Diego’s Global Health Program, moderating the event as our Master of Ceremonies.
Kimala Price, Ph.D.
Kimala Price is Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University. She is also Co-Director of the Bread and Roses Center for Feminist Research and Activism at SDSU.
A political scientist by training, her research focuses on reproductive health policy and politics, women of color and the reproductive justice movement, interpretive research methodology, and community-engaged research.
She is the author of Reproductive Politics in the United States, which was published in 2021 by Routledge. Her research has also been published in journals such as Politics & Gender; Politics, Groups and Identities; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Women’s Health Issues; Sexuality Research and Social Policy; and Contexts, and in edited volumes such as Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip Hop Feminist Anthology and LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader.
A scholar-activist at heart, she has been actively involved in the reproductive rights and reproductive justice movements for nearly 30 years, including working for a number of advocacy groups in Washington, DC, Boston, MA, and Atlanta, GA, and serving on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest in San Diego for many years.
Megha Shankar, MD
Megha Shankar, MD, is an internal medicine physician, educator, and researcher at UC San Diego. She obtained her undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Biology at the University of Chicago, medical degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, residency at the University of Washington, and health services research fellowship at Stanford University/Palo Alto VA.
She practices primary care at the 4th and Lewis clinic in Hillcrest as well as the UCSD Asylum Shelters Clinic. She also spends time in medical education, women's health, and health equity research.
Her prior work involves intimate partner violence screening, diabetes disparities, HPV vaccine attitudes in East African immigrants, female genital cutting, cultural humility in reproductive health, maternal health disparities, and anti-racism curriculum development.
She has medical experience in various urban and rural areas in the US as well as in India, Kenya, Ghana, and Peru. At UCSD, she collaborates with other clinician educators and researchers to promote social justice and health equity. She is currently leading the development, implementation, and evaluation of a new social justice curriculum within the primary care pathway of the internal medicine residency program.
Sabrina Boyce, PhD
Dr. Sabrina Boyce is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California, San Diego. Since 2010, Ms. Boyce has been conducting research that guides domestic and international approaches to reproductive health promotion and gender-based violence prevention. Her research illuminates community and societal-level determinants of violence and develops evidence from both randomized and non-randomized trials on the effectiveness of real-world public health interventions through support from funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, David and Lucille Packard Foundation, World Bank, and federal and state agencies.
Evidence of her contributions to the fields of reproductive and sexual health, adolescent health, reproductive coercion, domestic violence, sexual violence, and sex trafficking is demonstrated through more than 25 peer-reviewed publications. Central to her research approach are community partnerships and innovative methods, including modern causal inference and social network designs, that help answer practice-driven questions. Ms. Boyce has obtained extramural funding from NIH, CDC, California Department of Public Health, and the U.S. Fulbright Program to support her domestic and international research.