Fiddian-Green, Gubrium Co-edit Special Journal on Critical Narrative Intervention

Health promotion and policy alumna Alice Fiddian-Green ’13MPH '19PhD and professor Aline Gubrium have co-edited a special issue of Health Promotion Practice exploring the use of Critical Narrative Intervention (CNI). They also provide the issue's opening editorial where they introduce CNI as “a key theoretical framing for an asset-based, narrative, and participatory approach to promoting health and addressing social inequality.”

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The collection showcases the innovative methodologies – comics, graphic novel, storybooth, cellphilms, digital storytelling and photovoice – being used by public health practitioners. The special collection showcases six CNI projects that promote equity and justice in the context of LGBTQ, nonbinary and other gender-diverse young people; people who inject drugs living with hepatitis C virus; young women who trade sex; undocumented and formerly undocumented immigrants; and people living with HIV/AIDS.

“It is our intent that this collection of exemplars can serve as a guidepost for practitioners and researchers interested in expanding the scope of critical public health praxis,” Fiddian-Green and Gubrium write. “Individually and collectively, the special collection illustrates how CNI can create space for the increased representation of historically silenced populations, redress stigma, and provoke important questions to guide a new era of health equity research.”

Fiddian-Green, now an assistant professor in the master’s of public health (MPH) program in the School of Nursing and Health Professions at the University of San Francisco, conducted her graduate studies under the mentorship of Gubrium. She specializes in the application and analysis of digital and visual participatory research methods to examine social, structural, and racial inequities as they pertain to reproductive health and justice. Fiddian-Green was certified as a Digital Storytelling facilitator in 2015. Since then, she has co-facilitated and worked on digital storytelling projects in a range of classroom, research, and community contexts. Her current research examines the intersections between structural and interpersonal trauma, mental health, and substance use among pregnant people and mothers.

Gubrium is an internationally renowned expert on the use of participatory, visual, narrative and ethnographic methods to study the sexual and reproductive health knowledge and decision-making of marginalized women, youth and families. She is a co-lead investigator on a four-year, Massachusetts Department of Public Health-funded award to examine adolescent sexual and reproductive health inequities in Massachusetts, and also served as a lead investigator on a five-year, community-based participatory research study, funded by the NIMHD, with Springfield’s MOCHA group.