the NUANCE // a community health podcast. · Medicine Explained.

ep 124 The history of migration and how borders influence health with Professor Heba Gowayed

·50 min

Nuance Podcast explores immigration policy through a health equity lens with Heba Gawayed, a sociology professor and Carnegie Fellow whose award-winning book 'Refuge' examines displaced Syrian families in the US. Gawayed reframes immigration terminology to center the human (using 'person who sought refuge' rather than 'refugee'), then traces how state institutions—shaped by racist exclusion laws from 1882 onwards—systematically deny immigrants the investments needed to thrive. The episode connects incarceration, structural racism, and colonial extraction to contemporary migration crises, arguing that displacement is not choice but compulsion created by US foreign policy, climate colonialism, and extraction of resources from the global South. Host Amanda connects this to community medicine and health equity work.

As heard by us

A grounded conversation about migration that keeps health, race, and policy in the same frame.

Heba Gawayed, a writer and associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College and the Graduate Center, talks with Amanda about migration and borders through health and unequal institutions.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want border history that sharpens present-day health politics.

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