The SIREN Podcast · Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network

Two Poems for Poetic Health Justice: Poetry as Praxis for an Antiracist and Decolonized Future of ‘Radical Possibility’

·14 min·1 clip

In his poem, Dr. Padaway describes epidemiologists as 'armies of statistical engineers manufacturing measures of vulnerability' that reduce Black lives to data points.

Dr. Ryan Petteway, a social epidemiologist, psychologist, and poet, presents a talk on poetry as a tool for antiracist and decolonizing praxis in public health. This episode, recorded for the SIREN podcast, features Petteway reading two of his original poems published in peer-reviewed public health journals. He argues that traditional health research often perpetuates structural racism by commodifying the suffering of marginalized communities. Petteway critiques how grants for studying racial inequalities financially benefit universities and advance scholars' careers while offering little to the communities being studied. He references a paper in *Critical Public Health* that details how institutions become "engines of racial capitalism." His first poem, published in the *International Journal of Epidemiology*, confronts this extraction, imagining stacked bodies asking "the sun not to make us so sad." Petteway cites scholar LeConté Dill and her concept of the "great silence of scientific knowledge," where poetic expression is erased as illegitimate. He challenges the deficit-focused narratives that dominate discussions about Black and LGBTQ+ health, which are always framed as "worse than" white health without acknowledging joy or resistance. Petteway invokes indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith on how misrepresentation becomes accepted truth. His second poem, "Relatives Risk or I Am Not Your Data: Ode to Delphine’s Walk, Part Two," is a tribute to his great-aunt from Booth, Alabama, and a reflection on his position as a Black social epidemiologist. The poem powerfully rejects the objectification of people as data points, addressing "armies of statistical engineers" and declaring, "You can kiss this non-parametric ass over its full distribution." It concludes with a vision of communities as "remakers" who "bend arcs" instead of flattening curves. A surprising insight is Petteway's revelation that administrative fees from research grants pay mortgages, directly linking academic practice to structural inequity. He notes his poems are among the first of their kind in public health literature, breaking a formal silence. Petteway announces the creation of the first standing poetry section in a public health journal, co-founded with Dr. LeConté Dill, and invites submissions. The tone is academically rigorous yet deeply personal, passionate, and confrontational, blending critical theory with lyrical performance. The style is a declarative spoken-word lecture, using poetry as primary evidence and argument. This episode will deeply resonate with public health practitioners, critical race scholars, and anyone interested in creative, emancipatory approaches to knowledge production. Listeners seeking conventional, data-heavy health research presentations may find its poetic and polemical style challenging.

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