Examining coping strategies and resilience among immigrant communities reflects a commitment to working with immigrant communities to understand their needs while also identifying and building upon their strengths. In the United States, the physical, emotional, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic intersected with existing structural inequities to produce distinct challenges and stressors related to the pandemic, immigration, caregiving responsibilities, and structural xenophobia. Leveraging an understanding of the multilevel effects of stress, this qualitative study explores individual, interpersonal, and community-level coping strategies immigrant women used to respond to, alleviate, or reduce distress related to these compounding stressors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRationale: Immigrants represent a rapidly growing proportion of the population, yet the many ways in which structural inequities, including racism, xenophobia, and sexism, influence their health remains largely understudied. Perspectives from immigrant women can highlight intersectional dimensions of structural gendered racism and the ways in which racial and gender-based systems of structural oppression interact.
Objective: This study aims to show the multilevel manifestations of structural gendered racism in the health experiences of immigrant women living in New York City.
Context: The United States' response to COVID-19 created a policy, economic, and healthcare provision environment that had implications for the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of racialized and minoritized communities. Perspectives from heterogenous immigrant communities in New York City, the pandemic epicenter in the United States (US), provides a glimpse into how restrictive social policy environments shape contraception, abortion, pregnancy preferences, and other aspects of SRH for marginalized immigrant communities.
Methods: We conducted in-depth interviews in 2020 and 2021 with 44 cisgender immigrant women from different national origins and 19 direct service providers for immigrant communities in New York City to explore how immigrants were forced to adapt their SRH preferences and behaviors to the structural barriers of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 crisis has taken a significant toll on the mental health of many students around the globe. In addition to the traumatic effects of loss of life and livelihood within students' families, students have faced other challenges, including disruptions to learning and work; decreased access to health care services; emotional struggles associated with loneliness and social isolation; and difficulties exercising essential rights, such as rights to civic engagement, housing, and protection from violence. Such disruptions negatively impact students' developmental, emotional, and behavioral health and wellbeing and also become overlaid upon existing inequities to generate intersectional effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring the pandemic, Mexico experienced one of the longest periods of school closures in Latin America. After the first year of COVID-19, thousands of college students dropped out of school, which has been partially attributed to difficulties in adapting to online learning. This study examines how some college students in Mexico coped with and overcame these challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWomens Health Rep (New Rochelle)
July 2023
Purpose: To provide perspectives from heterogenous cisgender immigrant women and service providers for immigrants in New York City (NYC) on how restrictive sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care delivery environments during COVID-19 shape immigrant's access to health care and health outcomes to generate insights for clinical practices and policies for immigrant women's health care needs.
Methods: A qualitative study was conducted in 2020 and 2021, including in-depth interviews with 44 immigrant women from different national origins and 19 direct service providers for immigrant communities in NYC to explore how immigrants adapted to and were impacted by pandemic-related SRH care service delivery barriers. Interviews were coded and analyzed using a constant comparative approach.
In this article, we introduce the SSM-MH Special Issue "Journaling and Mental Health during COVID-19: Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project," which presents findings from the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP). PJP is an online journaling platform and mixed-methods research study created in May 2020 to provide ordinary people around the world an opportunity to chronicle the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in their lives-for themselves and for posterity. The essays in this collection demonstrate how journaling via an online platform can help illuminate experiences of mental wellbeing and distress, with important implications for both research and clinical practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent research has documented the harmful health consequences of structural-level stigma that targets sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals. In the case of sexual and gender minority youth (SGMY), life trajectories are shaped not only by targeted, SGM-focused policies, but also by social policies more broadly which may have unique impacts on SGMY given their social position. However, little work has explored the pathways that connect both targeted and universal social policies and the health and well-being of SGMY.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThousands of Central American women have been displaced from their countries of origin by violence. While the violence committed against them is often portrayed as isolated acts of aggression, women's suffering is also produced and perpetuated by humanitarian interventions that immobilize women in dangerous transit zones. Interventions are then justified by institutional logics that juxtapose women's vulnerability against the threat of their own mobility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this article, I examine the psychosocial and phenomenological implications for the lived experiences of collective mobility among Central American asylum seekers and irregular migrants bound for the United States. I argue that attentiveness to migrants' embodied practices and encounters with the material world engender novel insight into the generative and productive potential of collective journeying. I focus on migrant caravans through Mexico that have surged in recent years in response to escalating rates of gang violence, extreme poverty, and environmental devastation in Central American countries.
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