Key takeaway:
Dr. Sean Arayasirikul secures funding for innovative research addressing health disparities in sexual and gender minoritized communities, with a community-engaged, intersectional approach, partnering with the House and Ball Community to measure structural racism and other oppressions impacting vulnerability to HIV and other infections.
Medical sociologist and UC Irvine associate professor-in-residence, Sean Arayasirikul, PhD (they/them), at the Program in Public Health was awarded a grant from the University of California Office of the President’s California HIV/AIDS Research Program. The Program is a funding mechanism intended to support innovative research that is attentive to the needs of Californians and that accelerates progress toward prevention and a cure for HIV/AIDS.
In this study, Arayasirikul will use mixed methods to examine how geographies and social spaces – as well as the histories, policies and practices embedded therein – are racialized. They hope to understand how structural racism is enacted through social spaces, driving structural vulnerability among sexual and gender minoritized people of color (SGMPoC) to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STI).
“While there is a body of research that show racial disparities exist in who may be vulnerable to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, the tools we have to understand and measure underlying social and structural processes of racism are underdeveloped,” Arayasirikul said. “Our focus will be to measure geographic and spatial determinants of structural racism as well as account for other structural oppressions, specifically structural homophobia, cissexism and transmisia, sexism, and xenophobia and their intersections.”
While there is a body of research that show racial disparities exist in who may be vulnerable to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, the tools we have to understand and measure underlying social and structural processes of racism are underdeveloped.”
– Sean Arayasirikul, PhD
Using a community-engaged research approach, Arayasirikul will focus their work on and will partner with the House and Ball Community (HBC) in California, which emerged in the 1970s as an underground sub-culture of SGMPoC to combat structural racism. The HBC is a motor of today’s society, influencing pop culture, fashion, music, film and television.
“This Public Health Critical Race praxis-informed study uses diverse, critical, intersectional approaches and meaningful engagement through community-engaged research to center the experiential knowledge of minoritized communities. It examines structural racism in a multi-level, multi-faceted, interconnected, systemic, ecologically valid way,” Arayasirikul said.
Dr. Arayasirikul is also the associate director of the Center for Gender & Health Justice, under the umbrella of the UC Global Health Institute, and is a member and national leader in the House and Ball Community. They recently were awarded the West Coast People’s Choice trophy for the category of Best Dressed.
