The 2020 Health Equity Symposium (November 17-19) was an amazing time. Thankfully, it’s not too late for you to engage with us around the theme this year:
Seeking Health Equity During COVID
Please find the recorded sessions below and hear from health and community health professionals on how Covid-19 has drawn attention to — and exacerbated — long-time health disparities. Learn in the keynote how and why pandemics disproportionately harm populations at the bottom of social hierarchies. And breakout session panelists discuss community and clinical efforts seeking to address these disparities in the context of the pandemic and beyond — and how we can all play a part. Ultimately, advocates for health equity must reckon with the legacies of the past to forge healthy futures for all.
Keynote Address:
HIV, COVID-19, and the Spatial Legacies of Colonization and American Apartheid (Tuesday, November 17, 4-5:30 pm) 
- Lawrence Brown, PhD (UW-Madison Population Health Institute)
- Learn about Dr. Brown and his new book, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America
- Watch the recorded keynote address without captions.
- Watch the recorded keynote address with captions.
Breakout Sessions:
- Community Organizations Seeking Health Equity During COVID (Wednesday, November 18, 4-5:30 pm)
- Watch the recorded panel discussion without captions.
- Watch the recorded panel discussion with captions.
- Clinical Organizations Seeking Health Equity During COVID (Thursday, November 19, 5-6:30 pm)
- Watch the recorded panel discussion without captions.
- Watch the recorded panel discussion with captions.
- Capitol Lakes Assisted Living Program
- Emergency Physician
- Madison Veteran Affairs (VA) Suicide Prevention Team
- Mendota Mental Health Institute
- Ho-Chunk Tribal Health Centers
- Wingra Family Medical Center
Fall 2019
The Health Equity Symposium in fall 2019 focused on intersections between dimensions of human experience that impact health and healthcare outcomes. Health equity researcher, Quinton Cotton gave the keynote, “Positionality: Grounding Equity and Intersectionality Work.”
He discussed the fact that achieving health equity requires understanding differences in life opportunities and outcomes as the product of values, beliefs, narratives, policies and other influencers in a society. Positionality must be examined to discern spectrums of difference, such as identity. “Only when positionality is examined in a fine-grained way can we refine methods for achieving health equity” (Quinton Cotton).
Breakout sessions:
- Health and Religion (Corrie Norman, PhD)
- Health and Criminal Justice (Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, PhD)
- Health, Education, and Health Literacy (Luis Columna, PhD)
- Health and Social Determinants of Health (Gina Green-Harris, MS)
Health is more than the absence of disease. Health is about jobs and unemployment, education, the environment, and all of those things that go into making us healthy.
DR. JOCELYN ELDERS