The third learning community was no more exciting to me than the second one. It began with Dr. Reedy, from the first learning community, making a second appearance. Then, Dean James Donaldson got up to speak. They were both very excited about the wide range of interdisciplinary classes that Howard University will be offering starting in the Spring. They said that Freshman Seminar has been sort of a launching pad for these new classes, but that starting next semester, students can expect to see at least 70 new interdisciplinary courses.
In fact, the topic of this learning community was “The Importance of Interdisciplinary Approaches in African American Studies”. The presenter was Dr. Fatimah L. C. Jackson, Professor and Director at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Institute of African American Research (IAAR) and Anthropology Department. She said that interdisciplinary research is the hallmark of the twenty-first century. As society progresses, there is less and less use for single-subject expertise; new discoveries are necessitating new approaches to research and information. Dr. Jackson said that this type of research will be useful and profitable in the future.
Dr. Jackson began by setting out the idea that anything at all that affects African Americans, from air quality to music, is a part of African American studies. She said that the problem researchers face today, though, stems from human heterogeneity. People and races have mixed in many ways and at many times, so people do not usually fit neatly into racial categories, and although the differences between human make-ups are small, it is significant enough to affect different types of populations enormously. Dr. Jackson holds that we need new approaches to comprehensively capture the subtle nuances of human biodiversity, and for her this applies especially too specific issues of health.
Dr. Jackson said that disease susceptibility is filtered through several cultural-environmental factors. A person begins with their genotype, or genetic background. This is then filtered through the sociocultural environment, which can include things like language, religion, ethnic identity, socialization, and class structure. The genetic dispositions are further filtered through the abiotic and biotic environment, which can include things like diet, subsistence, occupation, body form, toxicants, humidity, altitude, radiation, precipitation, and pharmaceuticals. All of these things working in conjunction produce a phenotype, or expressed genotype. And it is easy to see how, with so many factors going into its make-up, phenotypes can easily vary a multitude of ways.
Dr. Jackson suggest the use of a technique called Ethnogenetic Layering (EL) as a tool to incorporate data from diverse fields in order to better understand the role of population substructuring in identifying and assessing disparities, because it is clear that not all black populations across America are the same. EL combines historical assessments, geographical appraisals, cultural reconstructions, genetic evaluations, and health risk factors. Researchers fine tune their studies to specifiy each group. None of use is solely one kind of African. We aare mostly West and West Central African. But if we look back into our history, our lineages converge- more people are related to each one of us, and there were less people in existence.
EL has some practical applications to health that Dr. Jackson has already found, and promises to reveal more, because it allows scientists to reconstruct sensitivities. Hypertension and stroke can be traced back to West Africans close to the equator who adapted to a salt-restrictive environment, and who, when moved by slavery to a more salt-abundant environment, retained their salt sensitivity. Also, a strain of breast cancer with an aggressive, early-onset nature has been found both in African American women of the Chesapeake Bay Region and in the Bight of Bonny, West Africa, suggesting a genetic link between the two groups.
Dr. Jackson ended by saying that interdisciplinary work was necessary because our people are suffering.
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