Department of Health Behavior, Gillings School of Global Public Health, PhD Student
My name is Dane Emmerling and I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Health Behavior at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health (started in 2018). I research and evaluate critical consciousness-raising interventions or experiences and programs that shift individuals’ and institutions’ attitudes and behaviors about their participation in systems. Specifically, I am doing community-based participatory research with the Racial Equity Institute’s (REI) Phase 1 training on structural racism. Our partnership has involved 1) interviewing the community organizers who lead the REI trainings and the organizations who book REI for training, 2) conducting a quantitative evaluation of changes in participant’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors with more than three thousand training participants, and 3) writing a case study on a system change process led by one of REI’s partners that involves judges, teachers, social workers among other stakeholders, who are coming together to collectively shift the disproportionate outcomes in the juvenile justice system in their city. Before starting the PhD, I worked in global health evaluation and in service-learning offices supporting universities linkages with community organizations. You can learn more about my and REI’s work by watching us present together at UNC’s Race, Racism and Racial Equity (R3) Symposium.