Abstract
African Caribbean women in the UK who are diagnosed with chronic illnesses that are related to overweight and obesity are more likely to experience poorer outcomes than their White British counterparts. It is then important to increase understandings of how women from this ethnic group perceive health with relation to body shape and size so that interventions can be developed to prevent the development of such conditions and to improve outcomes. As such, it is important to develop research methodology that encourages participation in health research from African Caribbean women and enables the capture of in-depth data that gives insight into the nuances of health understandings related to the body and the social realities in which they exist. This paper details the methodological framework of The Big Talk project, an investigation that sought to develop a novel approach to conducting health research with seldom heard communities. The concept of intersectionality, as used in Critical Race Theory, was applied as a theoretical tool for exploring the dynamics of societal power and where this power intersects across the lived realities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and class. For this research, these intersections are explored for African Caribbean women and how they relate to concepts of health, body shape, and size. This research study was conducted in spaces identified as liminal spaces for African Caribbean women: talk radio programmes; hairdressing salons and; local community groups. A Black feminist epistemological approach was used to facilitate the collection of data. The data that emerged from these liminal spaces are not necessarily definitive answers on health for African Caribbean women, but rather illuminate alternative ways of understanding the social world from the perspective of those subject to power. This phenomenon makes liminal spaces intersectional in their construction and in taking such an approach to analysis could enable finely grained details of discourses regarding health, wellness and the body to be gathered. The importance of this understanding can help to improve preventive health interventions for African Caribbean women.
Highlights
In the UK, the risk of developing conditions such as stroke, hypertension and diabetes for African Caribbean women is higher than for White British women (Tillin et al, 2012; Conolly and Davies, 2018)
The use of intersectionality as a theoretical tool allowed for the exploration of the dynamics of societal power and where this power intersects across the lived realities for the women who took part in this investigation
Understandings that emerge during the research process cannot claim to offer definitive answers on health for African Caribbean women, but rather illuminate alternative ways of understanding the social world from the perspective of those that are seldom heard in research
Summary
In the UK, the risk of developing conditions such as stroke, hypertension and diabetes for African Caribbean women is higher than for White British women (Tillin et al, 2012; Conolly and Davies, 2018). 129) suggest that one way that intersectionality can be used practically is by adopting a group centered approach, that “places the marginalized group and their perspectives at the center of the research.” In developing this approach to methodology, the relationship between the classical theoretical notion of the sociological imagination as “the awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society” (Wright-Mills, 1959 [2000]) is re-articulated for diverse societies such as the UK through a postcolonial lens that seeks to explore these relationships through the idea of connected realities, between and within societal groups (Bhambra, 2007). The research seeks to map the margins (Crenshaw, 1991) of understanding between African Caribbean women and the mainstream or biomedical perspective of health through body shape and size—research becomes the bridge between
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