Interview with Professor Sarah Gamble: Bridging Together Studies of Gender, Sexuality, and Public Health

I interviewed Professor Sarah Gamble, a Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Gender and Sexuality Studies. She leads the Public Health Collaborative at Brown University (specifically at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women). Gamble focuses specifically on engaging the entire community (students and faculty alike) in reproductive justice work. She also teaches a class for undergraduates, called “Gender-Based Violence Prevention.” Her bio reads:

“Sarah Gamble (she/her) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Gender Studies. She has worked at the intersection of gender/sexuality studies, public health, and LGBTQ community health for two decades, in Edinburgh, Scotland; the Bay Area, California; and Providence, Rhode Island. She received her Ph.D. in queer theory from Edinburgh University.” (bio and photo from Brown Pembroke Center Website)

Could you talk about how you personally got involved in the fields of public health and gender and sexuality studies? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities?

When I went to grad school at Edinburgh University in Scotland, I was focused on queer male sexuality. I was focused particularly on the AIDS epidemic, but not exclusively. That was the subject of my dissertation and my research. At the same time, I was working for two different LGBT organizations in Scotland. One in particular focused on LGBT youth in Scotland, and I worked there for seven years. When I was working for them, I was doing a lot of grant-funded work. This included everything from running youth groups to doing outreach to implementing safer sex education in high schools and more. A lot of it was very focused on HIV and AIDS because that’s where a lot of the grant money came from. Still to this day, a lot of research dollars in the United States are focused on HIV prevention when looking at queer male communities in particular. So, in that way, I went into public health.

I was a real humanities person. I was an English and politics major. I was not interested in science, but I kind of walked backward into public health by doing all this LGBT community work and realizing how important and central health is to LGBTQ communities as well as other marginalized communities. I mean, it’s important to everybody, but you really realize the disparities that people face in the world when you’re funded to focus on marginalized communities. You get money to hand out condoms, to talk to people about them, etc. And you realize a lot of times, it’s not really just about having access to things. It’s also about much more complicated stuff, such as people feeling worthy of asking people to use safer sex supplies, people feeling comfortable asking for what they need, and more. A lot of that is tied up in self-esteem, empowerment, and marginalization. Things like that were really interesting to me. So, I kept my hand in that work while I was writing a very theoretical kind of English major dissertation.

When I finished, it was at the start of the Great Recession. And so it was a really bad time to get a job in something kind of esoteric. As a result, I ended up pivoting. I moved to California and I did a lot more work focusing on LGBT community health. I got hired to work at UC Berkeley and improve student health — particularly LGBTQ health. That came with a lectureship in public health. I never actually took classes in public health, so I told the school that I was not sure I should be teaching it. But, they were like “You know what you’re doing, so you’re doing it.” So, I taught these big public health classes for a long time with a focus on the basics of public health as well as all the intersections with social determinants for health and health disparities. We thought about what makes certain populations more vulnerable to illness and sickness. That’s what started my interest in this field.

Then, I spent specifically a lot of my time at Berkeley and afterward, worked in violence prevention. Violence prevention comes up a lot for LGBTQ folks. So, to summarize, sexual violence prevention and suicide prevention were two of the areas that I have spent some of my career working on. The last one was at the Department of Health here in Rhode Island, where I led a new suicide prevention for the state.

Can you please discuss the goals of the Pembroke Public Health Collaborative, which I read that you direct? How did you get involved?

The background to that is that our Pembroke Center Director, Leela Gandhi, asked me to run this project, even though I had actually applied for a different job in the center. She said that she thought that the Pembroke Center needed to do more. The Pembroke Center is historically, humanities, Gender and Sexuality Studies, a lot of English majors, a lot of theater, a lot of film, a lot of creative folks, and a lot of literary theory. It doesn’t really include modern culture and media-related things. It’s not as heavy in social science and definitely not public health.

Gandhi felt like there were a lot of students — in particular, undergraduates — that were really interested in talking about gender and sexuality studies and public health together. We’re a small center. So, she was interested in me coming in and starting a project looking for opportunities for students in particular to connect on that intersection. So, that started two years ago.

I came in and I met with a whole bunch of people in the School of Public Health faculty to start out, just to learn what they were working on. The biggest thing that floated to the surface was reproductive justice. That’s been the focus of most of the work, but not all of the work that I’ve done over the past two years. The project has been trying to get people together who are interested in reproductive justice and want to do the work but aren’t talking to each other. We have a lot of student groups that are super focused on reproductive justice and students who are really interested. We have a number of researchers working in this area, and we have a bunch of organizations in the community, but there isn’t really anything coordinating any of it. So, one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing. There are all these great people doing research, but students have no idea. Also, community organizations will reach out and say that they are tired of people from Brown contacting them and asking to do a partnership or work on a research project because they just don’t have the capacity to manage so many people.

Those couple of things together really inspired me to form the reproductive justice collaborative. It includes a monthly meeting that we started last year just with faculty, and are now expanding it. I have three students working with me over the summer, specifically on mapping out all the research resources in the area, and then trying to better coordinate them. That’s the project.

Out of curiosity, does the Public Health Collaborative involve undergrad and grad students as well as teachers? Or do you have a specific focus on engaging only one of those groups?

I try to engage people across all the different roles. My class is for undergrads, the Reproductive Justice Collaborative has been focused on faculty (but now we’re kind of inviting students in to participate), and we also have had some grad students there. So, different pieces of the project have been for different groups. Ideally, there’s something for everybody.

Does this project also include regular classes for students, or is it more focused on engaging student groups and community organizations?

I also teach one class as part of the Public Health Collaborative. It’s a seminar called “Gender Based Violence Prevention.” I teach it in the Spring.

Can you please tell me more about this class? How are the units in this class organized?

Like I said, I have a violence prevention background. I’ve done some work in that area. So, the class is called Gender Based Violence Prevention because it looks at both intimate partner violence as well as sexual assault, sexual harassment, and stalking.

A lot of times, research tends to focus on one or the other. They’re talked about as sort of separate phenomena. But really, all these types of violence are grounded in ideas about gender. They also all disproportionately impact women and trans and nonbinary people. There’s a gender dimension to it. That’s the premise of the class: to focus on those topics as a whole thinking from two perspectives. The first is from the perspective of Gender and Sexuality Studies and includes a more theoretical perspective of questions such as “How do we construct our ideas of gender? How do we construct our ideas of consent? Where does our current kind of understanding of consent come from? What are the limitations of that? What do we think about it? What are the ways that we think about violence, and how do those impede progress and reducing violence?” The second is from a public health perspective. It includes looking at where and when people intervene — individuals but also organizations. It includes asking “Where does the money go? Where are the gaps?” and then thinking through how to actually do community work that’s grounded in community on a topic like this.

The students all have to complete a project with a community that they are part of. This semester, we focused on stalking. So, they had to talk to a community that they identified and collect data related to stalking — not so much the incidents of stalking so much as asking “What are the social conditions that could give rise to people feeling the social permission to engage in things like intrusive behaviors and unwanted contact?”

How do you see themes of public health arising in your sexual and intimate partner violence studies? Do you ever see the two intersecting?

I think that gender-based violence is a public health issue because public health is really primarily concerned with the health of communities and populations. It’s not so much focused on individuals as it is looking at epidemiology, which is like the study of the distribution of disease. We can also call violence a disease in some ways.

Nevertheless, public health is newer to violence prevention. A lot of the work in violence prevention historically comes from the criminal and legal system. It was very focused on getting people to call the cops, getting cops to actually take intimate partner violence or sexual assault seriously, and having laws so that people actually were jailed for abusing their spouses (and not just set free if the victim declined to press charges), and more. So, public health came to the conversation later.

But really, what public health has to offer is that focus on community and population. This does not just include talking about individual disputes or things like that, but also the conditions in our society that contribute to violence, because it’s not equally distributed. It’s not equally distributed income-wise. It’s not equally distributed across different communities and populations. What are the things that make this type of violence more likely to occur, be perpetrated by certain people, be experienced by certain people, and like in certain times and places? Asking questions as such takes it out of a “good people, bad people” conversation, which I think is just not a very helpful way to think about most problems, especially violence. The lived reality is that most of the intimate partner violence and sexual assault that people experience comes from somebody they know. So, framing it in terms of “good person, bad person” perspective and saying that the “bad person” should be locked up and never have contact with the “good person” again is just not helpful. Some people say that if the person who is the victim wants to contact that person or has mixed feelings about having that person in their life, then maybe it was never violence. People then say that maybe society should blame the victim for not having a spine.

What they don’t really recognize is that a person could have many different reasons for feeling complicated about that relationship. It could be financial. It could be they’ve been with the other person for years. It could be that there are things about the other person that they like. It could be that they are a co-parent with the other person. It’s just so complicated and there are a million different possible reasons. Framing situations in these really moralistic terms of “good person, bad person” then starts victim blaming, as opposed to thinking of this more as a community or culture problem.

Instead, we should ask “What are the things that we are doing as a culture that are fostering gender based violence and communities? How can we reduce the risk factors for those things and then increase the protective factors?”

The Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence is doing this really cool work that’s very “cutting edge” violence prevention, that’s on community greening initiatives where they try to reduce intimate partner violence. It’s about going into areas that people might call “blighted,” where there’s no positive, nice community space for people to spend time in, and greeting them and getting money to put in parks on the strip between the roads or just in nice places for people to walk and be seen. Part of the motivation is that we know that when communities are less connected, violence flourishes — particularly intimate partner violence. It makes sense when you think about it: if you’re out with the community all the time and you’re walking and talking to people, then the community is more connected, and then will feel more responsible to take action if they see something happening to a given person. If your partner is being really aggressive, people might be a lot less inclined to protect you than if they’ve never seen you before, and think that they’re not going to ever see you again. This is a really different way of thinking about violence prevention. It’s very different from the “good person, bad person” framework. It leads to questions such as “How can we restructure our community so people feel more connected, and other people are there to help them when they need it?”

Of course, creating more connected communities has a whole bunch of other benefits as well. For instance, when people are out walking, they’re exercising. Or maybe it’s easier to go on walks to places like the grocery store, because the greening efforts created a nice path to walk on.

What are your goals for how you hope to see your work develop, specifically within the next few months or this year?

This year the big focus is going to be expanding the reproductive justice collaborative. I want to engage more students in the conversations with faculty and really try to better coordinate our work with the local community. I want to connect students who are interested in reproductive justice with organizations that they can work with, or researchers who are looking to employ students.

Under that, I’m also working on some events. For example, I’m just starting to work with a professor in the School of Public Health who’s actually a lawyer. She takes a public health policy approach to public health. She and I are working on her giving a talk before the election about the impact of recent Supreme Court decisions, such as the one that said that people who’ve been convicted of domestic violence cannot own a firearm. The Supreme Court upheld that, which was surprising because the Supreme Court is generally pretty pro-firearm. We’re putting together a public talk for this faculty member to give before the election, in the hopes that that will help people make their election decisions more wisely and think through some of the consequences of what the Supreme Court can and can’t do, and how important it is to make sure we elect somebody who puts good people on the Supreme Court.

What advice do you have for those interested in fields similar to your areas of interest? Do you have blogs, podcasts, or summer opportunities that you recommend students explore?

I think the most important thing is just to look at the things that you’re interested in. There are a lot of cool and interesting people doing cool and interesting work; some of the process of being a student and going to college is being exposed to those things and then also deciding what you really want to learn more about or on the converse, what isn’t for you.

Sometimes what I notice with a lot of students is a lot of pressure to be a very high-performance person, have a great resume, and really be focused on one thing. What I would say is, if you have the space and time to be able to just try random stuff that you’re interested in, you can really end up finding your way into something that makes you happy. If you don’t feel content and satisfied with work most of the time, you’re not going to want to keep doing it over the long term. To me, that’s the big thing.

Separately, if you’re interested, Dorothy Roberts, who is a famous scholar studying reproductive justice, has a podcast. She did a limited series podcast with MS magazine called “Torn Apart.” It’s also the name of her most recent book. It’s a really good series because it gives an overview of her.

She focuses a lot on the child welfare system. “Family policing” is the phrase that she uses to describe how social services interact with Black and Brown — particularly low-income, Black and Brown families — in this country. She’s a big advocate for the abolition of Child Protective Services and a proponent of trying to replace it with something else.

She really connects these ideas to carceral justice and the politics of incarceration. It’s super interesting because in the podcast, she interviews different community folks and researchers, and goes through the ways in which families are surveilled by the state. Ostensibly it’s for their benefit. But most of the cases that are reported to CPS are actually not abuse cases, which is something I did not know until I started reading her work. They’re neglect cases. Most of that neglect is because of financial deprivation. It’s people leaving their kids at home when they’re not supposed to. They don’t have anybody to take care of the kid. It’s people not feeding their kids because they have no money. Roberts points out how a lot of stuff related to neglect is pretty different from the things people think of when they think of CPS, which is a really violent situation. That does happen sometimes, but a lot of times it’s more of a structural violence. That’s a really interesting podcast to listen to.