Zoom-based suicide interventions. Tweets about racism. Seed-saving storytelling in the Philippines. These are the stories that Antonia Alvarez, MSW, PhD, studies.
“How do we listen to these stories as examples of resistance?” Alvarez asked when articulating her research agenda. “Or as examples of liberation? Or as examples of community-based and culturally-based practices of health? How do we integrate that into how we train, teach, and research about health?”
Most of Alvarez’s work is tied together by emphasizing the interventions and disruptions related to indigenous and queer communities, revealing how their practices heal, resist, or buffer harm, so social workers and social work researchers can identify, amplify and align them with what we know about health equity. She’s also looking for ways to support stories-as-health practices by giving the storytellers data to show that it’s working.
“Part of my goal is to redefine ‘health’ away from biometrics, away from a Western understanding of buckets of mental health and physical well-being,” she says. “Then we can apply an indigenous epistemology, so we’re looking at a whole person.”
She feels the pandemic has brought together three research lines for her: food sovereignty, racism, and suicide prevention. Alvarez has recently been focused on communities in the Philippines. When food access and food security became critical during the pandemic, Alvarez wanted to know who was actually feeding, healing and helping the people there.
In May of 2021 she received funding for a National Institute of Health funded EXITO grant, entitled Ang Pagtanom ug Binhi (The Planting of Seed), in partnership with Global Seed Savers, a non-governmental organization, to identify the health implications of food shopping movements in the Philippines. Together they interviewed community leaders, food practitioners, farmers, and those running urban farmers markets.
“When I wrote the grant, we were expecting to go to the Philippines,” said Alvarez, “We were expecting to see the work practitioners were doing and visit their farms to get a better understanding of the situations they’re in.”
Instead, participants performed what Alvarez describes as “unbelievable acrobatics” in digital spaces to figure out how to do relational, ethical, and meaningful community-based work. “They were calling in on Zoom from tiny islands in the Philippines, talking through rainstorms,” she said.
“To share their ideas like that is so motivating,” said Alvarez. “A lot of those meetings were long and late at night and took a lot of people’s time and effort to pull together, which is necessary to do the work right.”
At the beginning of 2022 Alvarez received another grant from the INSPIRE (Indigenous Substance Use and Addictions Prevention Interdisciplinary Research Education) program through the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute at the University of Washington. This grant allows her to expand and deepen her previous work in the Philippines, looking specifically at the feedback they received from a community advisory board to deepen and broaden their understanding of the role food sovereignty plays in indigenous communities.
To demonstrate that role, Alvarez describes colonization, imperialism, and government control as a catastrophe her Philippines partners were already facing. But during COVID-19, this was aggravated by farms under lockdown and people in urban centers unable to access fresh food, leading to nutritional disparities. To disrupt the resulting food deserts, farmers have several food sovereignty practices: they use plants as medicine, save seeds, and build farm-to-table practices through local farmers markets. Through each they also educate other people about the benefits of organic food.
Alvarez’s participants see these practices as active, colonial resistance and part of their historical and cultural rights. Doing this connects them back to the land with something their parents taught them and their ancestors practiced. It also challenges the agricultural corporations producing genetically modified organisms, pricing people out of using organic plants, and owning most of the farmland in their country.
Some may use roots or herbs, like ginger or turmeric as medicine for themselves and their families. Others save the seeds of specifically native or endemic plants, so they can survive climate change. By building seed libraries in different regions, they protect seeds from moisture and sunlight.
In December of 2021, a devastating typhoon hit the Philippines, significantly impacting Alvarez’s partners there. The project shifted quickly to think about mutual aid and improving access to water. Having those seed libraries was critically important to immediately replant.
Along with her community partners in the Philippines, Alvarez also works with BIPOC faculty from around the United States, collaborating on research agendas related to racism and youth suicide prevention. With anti-Asian racism coming from a sitting U.S. president during the 2016 election and the beginning of the pandemic, Alvarez worked with Asian and Pacific Islander communities to center equity, think about intervention design, and respond to the needs of community providers.
“Our students went into virtual school and our providers had no tools for doing suicide assessments or interventions that weren’t in person,” she said. “All our tools are based on training that we’ve received to do in person.”
Her colleagues at Portland State University also influenced Alvarez. “We have so many brilliant folks doing community based research and health equity research and critical or anti-racist research,” she said. “Collaborating with them has been an important part of my research agenda and trajectory.”
Together, she found all of these partners contributed to understanding what it means to ethically contribute to the field of social work. Especially during such a complicated, violent political time.