Professor Carole "Carly" Hutchinson
What are some of the major projects you’ve been working on this year?
A major focus for me during the past year has been my role as Principal Investigator for the first Mailman School Interprofessional Education Service Learning Fellowship. This work focused on providing support to Puerto Rico through a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) project regarding pediatric asthma. The idea began as response to Hurricanes Irma and Maria on the part of Mailman students, and evolved into a working group made up of faculty, staff and students that began meeting in the Fall of 2017. This initiative found a home in Mailman’s Office of Field Practice where I am Faculty Lead for Interprofessional Education and Service Learning, collaborating with Ana Jimenez-Bautista (Director) and Linda Cushman (Associate Dean).
Our leadership team began working with a community partner in San Juan that serves a marginalized community living along a polluted canal. After the hurricane, environmental health concerns became even more acute and our partner, Enlace el Caño Martín Peña, requested that we help them gather data on the incidence of childhood asthma in four of the eight neighborhoods that are part of this canal zone. Since last November an interdisciplinary team of 14 Fellows representing not only Mailman but several others Columbia Schools or programs (Nursing, Social Work, Institute of Human Nutrition, and Teachers College) as well as 6 Consortium Members from Mailman have been working to develop this CBPR project in concert with our partners in San Juan. One of the exciting interprofessional aspects of this project is not only the range of professions involved in it from Columbia, but that we also included medical students from the University of Puerto Rico and social work and psychology students from Universidad del Segrado Corazón. We are now working with our community partners to analyze our data and work on plans to put our findings to use in helping them secure funding for asthma-related interventions.
This year was also a busy one for me teaching my two Courses, Community-Based Participatory Research and A Public Health View of Mass Incarceration: Past, Present, and Future.
Additionally I am privileged to continue my work with the Incarceration Public Health Action Network (IPHAN) here at Mailman. In that regard, another exciting project I’ve been working on with Professor Patrick Wilson and the IPHAN team is a pilot study exploring the impact of different types of reentry programs on wellbeing and quality of life for people coming out of prison and jail. Generally, reentry program evaluation focuses on recidivism only, whereas our study seeks to get at deeper levels of impact that ultimately affect formerly incarcerated people’s ability to more fully integrate into society and live meaningful and fulfilling lives given the many structural barriers that await them after they have served their jail or prison sentence.
Which areas do you currently predict Mailman pervading in within the next 50 years?
I think we definitely have to address mass incarceration as a public health issue as it is one of the most significant social problems of our time that disproportionately impact people of color, poor people, and other people who are extremely marginalized, such as the LGBTQA communities. Another extremely critical public health issue is climate change. As my work in Puerto Rico attests, the impact of severe weather on poor communities is devastating. While wealthy areas of San Juan are seemingly improved since the hurricane in 2017, poor communities like the canal area where we conducted our research have been ignored. People are still living without water or electricity, some folks are living in homes without roofs and walls—protected from the elements only by flimsy tarps, and the incidence of health risks such as black mold and polluted water are ubiquitous. The incidence of severe weather will only continue to rise as climate change becomes more acute.
What do you hope to accomplish in the new year?
I want to finish analysis of our Puerto Rico CBPR project findings and work directly with our community partners in making sure that this information is used to benefit the community in improving health outcomes and decreasing environmental risks. There is also work we can do with them to help with preparedness in the face of future severe weather. As we know that marginalized communities are so vulnerable as they don’t have the resources to fully prepare and protect themselves, in fact they are already living in such precarious circumstances that another storm could be even more devastating for many people. We observed that older women, often living alone, were very common in the neighborhoods we surveyed. Additionally, I am excited to see the data we collect on reentry programming and the impact it has had on formerly incarcerated people.
What is something that you wish students knew about you or your work?
I have been studying marginalized groups for many years now—including access to social services by Muslims after 9/11; the trajectories of multi-step migrants moving between South Asia, East Africa and the US and Canada; the chronic health issues experienced by people living in Harlem; and the ways that everyday people like you and me can impact regional food systems through civic engagement and popular education. I think the common thread throughout all of my work is a focus on marginalized people whose plights are often forgotten or overlooked.
One of my personal passions is working with conservation land trusts to preserve forest and farmland in New England—this work involves permanently protecting land from development to preserve wildlife, native vegetation, and also to counter climate change by retaining native forests.
I love reading and many of the books I read wind up being featured in my classes. The most recent on my “top picks” reading list are Claudia Rankine’s latest book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, that eloquently illustrates the day-to-day trauma of being a person of color, and specifically African American, in the US. I also recently found the new book, How We Fight White Supremacy by Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin which Michael Eric Dyson described as, “The primer America needs right now!”
I am also a sci-fi/fantasy fan and like shows like Black Mirror and Penny Dreadful as well as shows that feature the LGBTQA communities—I’m looking forward to the new HBO series, Gentleman Jack.