A Year-End Q & A with the Minnesota COMM HSP Early Career Team

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Over the past three years, the University of Minnesota COMM HSP team has engaged many early career researchers, including masters students, doctoral students, masters-level research coordinators, and a postdoctoral fellow.

In this blog post, they reflect on their experience studying communication and health equity. The researchers interviewed here have engaged in a host of projects: analyzing the strategies communicators use to discuss health equity in practice; assessing news media coverage of topics including homelessness, Native people, Black youth mental health, and doulas; reviewing the literature on news media coverage of the social safety net; studying racialized and anti-trans messages in political campaign advertisements; partnering with community organizers to evaluate narrative strategy; investigating the politicization of public health, and more. This blog post serves as a reminder that the Collaborative on Media and Messaging for Health and Social Policy is not just a research team, but has also been an opportunity to train the future research workforce to engage in innovative, rapidly responsive and community-engaged communication research to meet today’s challenges. Below, they share their voices.

Q: The political landscape around health equity and communication has never been so fraught. How has this landscape impacted the research you’ve supported within COMM HSP?

Kene: The current political landscape has served as fuel and motivation for my future work. In one current project, where I am analyzing news media coverage of doulas contextualized within the maternal health crisis, I feel even more of a responsibility to accurately capture and document the mechanisms of racism. Literature and critical theories tell us that remaining colorblind is detrimental to population health. While the current administration has brought unique challenges to the work, unfortunately many impacted communities have faced far worse. It is evident that the need for health equity work is even more dire, and we cannot give up because health equity is no longer “trendy.” As a self-identifying scholar-activist, I encourage other scholars and practitioners interested in health equity to remain critical, get creative, and keep doing the work – because it is needed.

CeRon: My commitment to community-engaged and policy-relevant research was further shaped through my work with COMM HSP, particularly amid an increasingly polarized political landscape around health equity, media, and messaging. This work examines health disparities and inequities alongside the powerful role media and messaging play in shaping health and social policy across the life course. At a time when health equity research is often politicized or contested, this work has underscored the importance of using rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches to document inequities and elevate evidence-based narratives. By identifying underrepresented groups most affected by structural and communicative barriers to care, this research informs strategies to reduce inequities among at-risk populations. For example, by examining how intersecting social positions (e.g., being Black and young) shape media representations of mental health experiences in local television news, this work highlights how political and media environments can either reinforce or challenge stigma. These findings have implications for improving inclusive and culturally responsive communication practices and for informing political initiatives aimed at dismantling institutional barriers that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. More broadly, this experience has reinforced my understanding that media and public opinion are not neutral forces; they shape policy priorities and other political determinants of health. As a result, my future work remains firmly grounded in community-based participatory research and in centering the voices and experiences of underrepresented communities, especially in politically fraught contexts where those voices are most at risk of being sidelined.

Ben: Health equity work is political—a reality the current moment has brought into sharp relief. This is true for my current project which analyzes anti-trans narratives in political advertising from a health equity perspective. It is also true for the many interconnected fields of research that compose COMM HSP: racism, health communication, and community organizing, to name a few. As the longstanding material scarcities affecting this work intensify, I am grateful for the members of this team who have modeled the critical work I aspire to and support me in speaking my mind.

Q: Moving forward, where should the field focus its energy to advance health equity through communication?

Quin: The political moment we live in may have impacted funding, stability, and the overall vibes around health equity and communication research right now – but certainly not my dedication to the work. Regardless of what the government decides to say or do, the work will get done by passionate people who care deeply about health equity and how we talk about it. I’m still invested – even when others (be they funders, journals, or reporters) are moving along. That’s fine! The way I see it, one of academia’s weaknesses has become one of our strengths at this time: our inability to quickly mold ourselves and adapt to the current moment. I say this because it would be very easy to “give in” right now…to solely follow the money, to stop researching things we care about, to stop speaking out against injustice both related and unrelated to our areas of study. While funding is important, so are our principles. Those willing to stand resiliently and say that health equity is still necessary when it isn’t “in fashion” are communicating clearly where they stand – and that strength is something we will need once we maneuver out of this chaotic time in American politics.

Yusra: As conditions continue intensifying around us, and more and more scholars, community organizers, and journalists find themselves navigating increasingly sharp terrain, I have been so inspired and heartened by our shared commitments to find our role in amplifying the stories of people on the ground who are leaning into their power to resist, refuse, and fight back. When I started my work as a research assistant with COMM HSP, one of my first projects centered around the work of a group of community organizers in Colorado, building a base of mostly immigrants to fight for access to health care. The first stage of this research involved interviews with community leaders from the base – ordinary people who had decided to devote their time and energy to struggling together against behemoth healthcare institutions and powerful political and economic forces who are compromising our access to affordable and dignified care. It can be so easy to fall into despair, looking at the political landscape, and wonder, “how are we going to get out of this?” As I think about my future work, I think about how research can serve as a tool to uplift and amplify the incredible work of community organizers building collective power to transform our conditions, and keep us rooted and anchored in a politics of imagination, not despair.

Q: How will you bring the research methodologies you have used within COMM HSP into your future work?

Kristina: Working with COMM HSP has taught me to understand communication about health and social policy holistically. Understanding the media environment using media content analysis, designing powerful narratives with community partners, and examining the effects of messages through experimental design are skills that will all be used in my future research. I am deeply appreciative of the diverse skills I have gained, and I look forward to advancing message strategies for health equity through my research.

CeRon: The research methodologies I used within COMM HSP, particularly qualitative and quantitative approaches, will remain central to my future work examining health inequities in political and media contexts. I plan to continue pairing quantitative analyses that identify structural patterns with qualitative methods that center lived experiences, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of how communication and policy shape health outcomes. These approaches also reinforce my commitment to community-engaged research that produces evidence that is rigorous and directly relevant to the development of equitable health policies and practices.

Yusra: Within COMM HSP, I have learned and practiced three methodologies that feel aligned with my core research topics: media content analysis, writing and administering surveys, and conducting focus groups/interviews. Most importantly, I have seen how bridging these methods — for example, drawing from focus groups with housing justice organizers to develop a message-testing survey — challenges us to develop more nuanced research questions and sharpens our ability to answer them, even though it may extend the timeline of our projects. Particularly in projects involving community partners, I have deeply appreciated a culture of moving at the speed of trust and rejecting urgency, enabling us to offer research that is responsive to the needs of our partners and their members on the ground.

Q: Engagement, Dissemination, and Implementation are the key themes of the Minnesota “hub”. Do you have any tips for how to do dissemination effectively?

Muna: To disseminate effectively, I focus on two core principles: accessibility and application. My priority is to translate our research, which examines communication strategies for health and racial equity, into formats that are immediately useful for key audiences like practitioners and journalists.

As the external communications coordinator, I deeply value making our findings accessible. This means developing clear, actionable outputs from complex studies –think tip sheets, easy-to-read briefs, and blog posts that highlight the “so what.”

Then, we share this information strategically. We distribute it through our newsletters and host webinars with collaborators that connect our insights directly to practitioners’ work. This includes building relationships through local events and direct outreach, ensuring our research becomes a tool for their community reporting.

We also actively share on platforms like LinkedIn and Bluesky. This allows us to reach a broader community interested in changing narratives to advance health and racial equity, sparking conversations and ensuring our work doesn’t get siloed in the research space, but actively informs real-world communication strategies.

Q: Many of the researchers on the team have done content analysis work, developing coding instruments and applying them to media, mainly local television and political campaign ads. This is often very hard work, having to be systematic in watching and rewatching broadcast content, and the content itself is often negative – exposing some very difficult themes about how marginalized populations are socially constructed. Do you have any ideas on why this work is important?

Chloe: Though the work can be difficult, content analysis in the health equity space is important because it forces us to slow down and sit with the narratives people are exposed to every day, even when those narratives are upsetting. Systematically examining media content allows us to identify recurring patterns in how marginalized populations are portrayed (e.g., who is blamed, who is left out, which harmful stereotypes are reinforced, etc.). Documenting and quantifying these patterns helps us build evidence to understand how media may be contributing to and upholding harmful social constructions. Without that evidence base, it’s difficult to develop effective counterstrategies or to imagine alternative narratives that might disrupt those patterns. Although the work can be emotionally taxing and laborious, I see it as valuable groundwork for change in that it helps us more clearly see one part of a much larger puzzle before trying to address it more broadly.

Q: What advice do you have for other early career researchers who are interested in communication and health equity? What opportunities and challenges do you foresee for future research in this space?

Muna: My advice and what I have learned from our COMMHSP work is to actively collaborate with community partners and communication practitioners from the start. This ensures that your research is relevant and can be translated into real-world action. I think a major opportunity is using digital media to challenge dominant narratives and center community voices. Conversely, a key challenge will be navigating the complex information ecosystem where misinformation can easily undermine evidence-based messages aimed at advancing equity.
Yusra: There is a remarkable wealth of wisdom in this space — within journalism, academia, community organizing, and at their intersections. I have consistently found that everyone I have asked for support or mentorship has been willing, enthusiastic, and curious — whether that is political science faculty with rich knowledge about the journalistic landscape or communications organizers at local labor unions. I also find that more and more early-career researchers and graduate students are finding their research topic has something to do with communication, dominant narratives and counter-narratives; it is increasingly clear that no matter how much rigorous research we can get published to expand our academic understanding of housing deprivation, reproductive justice, food security, or otherwise, we often see an ever-growing uphill battle on the terrain of public discourse and public opinion. We are going to face immense challenges in the years ahead, but none of us are alone.

The University of Minnesota hub of COMM HSP has included the following early career researchers, staff, or students in the past year: Elizabeth Al, Marissa Evans, CeRon Ford, Chloe Gansen, Muna Hassan, Kristina Medero, Yusra Murad, Quin Mudry Nelson, Kene Orakwue, and Ben Weideman