For the first time in six years, ACPHS hosted the Capital District Feminist Studies Conference on Feb. 3, drawing close to 90 participants from a half dozen area colleges and the New York State Department of Health to discuss research on a wide range of topics.
The conference was the 11th annual event of the Capital District Feminist Studies Consortium, first organized in 2012 by Dr. Lisa Campo-Engelstein, a bioethicist then at Albany Medical College, to bring together feminist scholars working in various disciplines around the region.
As ACPHS Associate Professor Barry DeCoster explained, the conference has always considered the topic of feminism broadly – including not only women’s issues but more comprehensively the role of power in areas like gender, race and health-care access. ACPHS researchers’ contributions ranged from birth control access and maternal-infant health to stressors surrounding children’s poverty and structural inequalities identified at an asthma clinic. (The latter presentation was by ACPHS student Britney Mbeng and Associate Professor Paul Denvir, pictured above.)
Student participants approved of the broad approach to the topic.
“Feminism means something different to different people,” said Sophia Braithwaite, a public health student in her third year at ACPHS.
Braithwaite completed a poster with Collaboratory Manager Sabrina Howard and Associate Professor Wendy Parker entitled “Exploring Outcomes in Maternal and Infant Health in the Capital Region through the Implementation of a Doula Training Program.”
La-Danielle McNeil, a December 2022 public health graduate of ACPHS, said presenting her poster on disparities in access to emergency contraception on college campuses was personal to her, as an ACPHS transfer student who had challenges when she first arrived on campus getting her own birth control prescription transferred to Albany.
“It was really, really important to me,” McNeil said, adding about the conference, “This is something effective to get people learning and talking and looking for solutions.”
At a conference focused on power, even Mother Nature got in on the act. Strong winds knocked out the electrical power in the Holland Avenue Building during the poster presentation session of the conference, impacting the digital presentations. Researchers, who had braved brutally cold temperatures to attend, appeared unfazed. They continued to circulate and discuss their work, with presenters largely able to display their research on battery-powered laptops.