Participatory research and qualitative methods applied to environmental epidemiology

Abstract

S11: Conducting research on environmental epidemiology with Indigenous Peoples, August 27, 2019, 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM Environmental degradation, through contamination, deforestation, forest fragmentation and land use change are challenging people’s lives and well-being. In the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon, it is mainly indigenous people who are affected by the impact of environmental degradation on their health and wellbeing. Amazonian indigenous people have their own perspective on the relationship between their environment and themselves, about health and illness and agents that cause ill health and disbalance in the overall system. Eurocentric terms of environment, disease, the division between society and nature do not resemble within local cosmologies and perspectivism which inform peoples’ action towards prevention and treatment of ill-health. Most public health research continues to be oriented towards comprehending disease prevalence from a biomedical perspective to develop vertical public health interventions. This research is often lacking a historical and participatory approach that would allow to first comprehend historically grown power relations and embodied biopolitics playing out and second would allow engaging indigenous people as equivalent actors. In addition, it is an important factor that is likely contributing to unsuccessful public health interventions or so-called “cultural barriers” to health interventions. This presentation will demonstrate the need to combine environmental epidemiological methods with participatory research to comprehend better the lived experiences of environmental degradation and health experiences for indigenous people, drawing from examples from the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon region.