Access to high quality healthcare is severely limited in the region by a wide variety of factors including uninsurance and underinsurance, constrained health care delivery and availability, geography, legal and regulatory obstacles, and chronic underinvestment. For those suffering from stigmatized health conditions, access to care and quality of care are both compromised by the intermingling of healthcare systems with agencies that have the power to remove children and impose and carry out criminal punishment. Moreover, health, defined broadly, is inextricable from all aspects of the Center’s work. Our community research collaboratives in health justice start with pressing questions that particularly affect our region.
We ask:
What factors impact health care access, delivery, and availability in the region?
How does a lack of adequate insurance coverage, both public and private, impact access and quality in the region?
How do the structural conditions of poverty impact individual, family and community health?
How does criminalization affect access to and the quality of care?
How do individuals struggling with substance use disorder and other serious but stigmatized health conditions prevalent in the region imagine the care they need?
What factors limit or enhance the willingness of affected communities to access care?
What causes or perpetuates health disparities and what changes, programs, or policies might help eliminate those disparities?
What are the health implications of the problems we are researching in our other thematic areas? How might we bring a health justice lens to issues of community safety, land, and housing and community stability?
Stay tuned for future opportunities in Health Justice in the AJRL!
AJRC affiliated faculty are in the imagining and design phase for our health justice work, meeting for example with community leaders with ᏣᎳᎩᏱ ᏕᏣᏓᏂᎸᎩ (Tsalagiyi Detsadanilvgi)/Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to imagine how AJRC faculty and students might support the health justice goals of that community. Professor Wendy Bach (Law) is also working with national and regional partners on a research tracking the criminalization of pregnancy in the three years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, and researchers across the campus are meeting with community partners to envision the collective health justice work of the AJRC.
Community Partners
Healthy and Free Tennessee is a network of agencies, organizations, and individuals working together to promote sexual health and reproductive freedom in the state of Tennessee. Their organizational focus is on the intersections of racism, the criminal legal system, and reproductive justice. Healthy and Free Tennessee fights to improve access to reproductive health care for marginalized communities and fights punitive policies that seek to criminalize reproductive outcomes.
The mission of Hellbender Harm Reduction is to improve wellbeing and build solidarity in Tennessee by providing harm reduction supplies and advancing policies that support people who use drugs. Hellbender Harm Reduction was started by folks who are committed to Harm Reduction as a social justice movement. Hellbender was created to provide safer use supplies to North Knoxville neighbors, to organize and build solidarity alongside people who use drugs, and to engage in community education. Hellbender envisions a future where people who use drugs have real access to wanted services.
Since their founding in 2001, Pregnancy Justice (formerly National Advocates for Pregnant Women) remains the leading legal advocacy organization fighting to protect pregnant people’s legal rights by defending the civil and human rights of pregnant people who have been criminalized, focusing on those most likely to be targeted for investigation, arrest, detention, or family separation — poor people, people of color, and people who use drugs.
Affiliated Faculty
J. Douglas Coatsworth
Betsey R. Bush Endowed Professor in Behavioral Health & Associate Dean of Research, Center for Behavioral Health Research
College of Social Work
Teri Dobbins Baxter
Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Williford Gragg Distinguished Professor
College of Law
Kristi Gordon
Associate Dean for Community Engagement
College of Education, Health, and Human Science
Patrick Grzanka
Divisional Dean for Social Sciences, Professor of Psychology
College of Arts & Sciences
Laurie Meschke
Professor and PhD Program Director, Department of Public Health
College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences