Katie Swacha
Assistant Professor of English
University of Maine
Description of Work:
My work focuses on how people incorporate public health guidelines into their everyday lives, work that has taken on new significance with the COVID-19 pandemic. As an RHM scholar, I am also committed to research ethics and community-based approaches to research in RHM.
My latest project interrogates the notion of ‘empowerment’ by shifting our focus to the more mundane, fleeting moments in which health-based “empowerment” (or its converse) may occur, yet that can have significant impacts on individual or public health. My thinking on what I want to call ‘microempowerment’ has also been informed by recent work on health-based intuition: how do we become empowered to make daily health-based decisions that are unintuitive to us?
Of course, that question again has taken on new significance with COVID-19, as we are all urged to engage in social distancing behaviors that are likely not part of our prior intuitive intelligence or embodied experience—behaviors like remembering to grab your mask when answering the doorbell; staying 6 feet from your loved ones when they come to visit after months of not seeing them; not hugging your loved ones at a funeral.
This thinking is all coming together in an image- and narrative-based project, “Coping with COVID,” in which I ask participants to share photos/videos, and write brief stories, of how they are incorporating COVID-related public health guidelines into their daily routines. The site is both a research project and a crowd-sourced way to share experiences. Stay tuned!
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