Commonly perceived as a geography and social milieu dominated by the bodies and epistemologies of White people, Black, Latino, and Native American individuals continue to reflect and add to the growing cultural diversity and experiential complexity of rural communities across the United States. Visibly Invisible in Tompkins County: Black Drug Users On The Rural Fringes is a multi-level Community-Based Participatory Research project and intervention focused on uncovering and contextualizing the lives of rural Black people in the broader Ithaca area, focusing on examining the marginalization and "hiddenness" of those who nonmedically use opioids or inject drugs. Intimately collaborating with local organizations as well as local rural Black populations in curating and conducting policy-oriented research that visualizes the rural, Black "drug use experience," Visibly Invisible seeks to characterize patterns of drug use within this population directly inside and outside the margins of Ithaca and Tompkins County.
Collaborators:
- Jerel Ezell, assistant professor of Africana studies, Cornell University
- REACH Project, Inc., Ithaca, NY
- Southside Community Center, Ithaca, NY
- Czarina Navos Behrends, assistant professor of population health sciences, Weill Cornell Medical College
- Bruce Schackman, professor of population health sciences, Weill Cornell Medical College