Research Stay at the College of Applied Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago

From August 19^th to November 16^th, our colleague Belén Soto-Ponce is conducting a research stay at the College of Applied Health Sciences, at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Yolanda Suarez-Balcazar.

The UIC team develops participatory research initiatives focused on the intersection of ethnicity, culture, and health inequities among at-risk Latino families, using an ecological and social justice approach. Dr. Suarez-Balcazar, with extensive experience in designing and evaluating culturally adapted initiatives, has a long history of close collaboration with CESPYD.

As part of the PhD program in Psychology at the University of Seville, the goal of our colleague’s stay is to transfer the multi-level evaluation and advocacy model developed in her thesis with Roma communities, in order to apply it in the U.S. context with other at-risk communities, such as the Latino community. The transfer of this model will enable the development of innovative action-research approaches, relevant to the field of Community Psychology, as a response to the urgent need to generate new strategies for co-creating knowledge with communities and promoting transformative change.

As a result of this stay, Belén has also shared the progress of her thesis at the Midwest ECO Conference 2024: Reconnecting to Community, held at DePaul University in Chicago. At this conference, our colleague presented the poster: Exploring Roma Girls’ Socio-Political Agency: the Effect of Sense of Mattering within Family, School, and Community. Additionally, she participated as a panelist in the roundtable Rethinking Community-Engaged Research: Creating and Sustaining Transformative Partnerships, with Yolanda Suárez-Balcázar, Leonard Jason, Mayra Guerrero, Fabricio Balcázar, Claudia Castillo, Tonya Hall, Stephanie Torres, Brad Olson, and Andrea Leflore.

This stay has been funded by the Mobility Grants for Short Stays and Temporary Transfers from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities, associated with the University Teaching Staff (FPU) Grants, awarded to our colleague Belén in the 2019 call.