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Promoting Breastfeeding in Women with MS
A pioneering multi-disciplinary collaboration between a neurologist, a breastfeeding expert, and a nutritional scientist
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It’s tough to be a new mother, whoever you are, whatever your income, wherever you live. But for women with chronic health conditions, it’s exceptionally difficult. Even breastfeeding can feel like an insurmountable task, full of uncertainties about the transmission of medication in breastmilk and the physical demands of holding an infant for long periods of time.
This past summer, an Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grant team, aided by Spelman Rockefeller funding, began studying breastfeeding in women with multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic disease of the brain and spinal cord. “There’s a huge gap of knowledge in regards to breastfeeding for women with MS,” say the grant project’s co-directors Christine Gill (Clinical Assistant Professor, Neurology), Pamela Mulder (Clinical Assistant Professor, Nursing), and Solange Saxby (Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Internal Medicine)—largely because pregnant and lactating women tend not to volunteer for research trials. It’s a serious oversight, since MS is three times more common in women than in men and is more frequently diagnosed in women of childbearing age (between 20 and 40) than in any other group. Symptoms vary among patients but commonly include fatigue, muscle weakness, tingling, numbness, vertigo, and walking difficulties due to nerve fiber damage.
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Yellow fever was once a terrifying killer that violently took the lives of half of the people who contracted it. It killed workers building canals, soldiers engaged in sieges, and investors on fact-finding missions. A viral disease spread between humans and primates, it is caused by a species of mosquito that prefers clean, fresh water. Before this was proven decisively in 1901, yellow fever was a major player in the Caribbean during the colonial period.
The virus, which often reached epidemic proportions and was used to stir racist hysteria, has been historian Mariola Espinosa’s research companion for more than two decades. After first concentrating on Cuba, she has broadened her scope to a book project, Fighting Fever in the Caribbean: Medicine and Empire, 1650–1902. Espinosa, an Associate Professor in the Department of History and a Spring 2019 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, says that her focus on yellow fever occurred greatly by chance. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, she found herself grasping for a topic to research for a history class. The professor was a native of Puerto Rico, as is Espinosa, and he suggested that she research the namesake of the street on which she’d grown up in San Juan: Ashford Avenue.
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In the beginning, Humanities Without Walls (HWW) was an untested idea. An experiment. In 2012, Dianne Harris, then-director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH), led a planning effort that included humanities center directors from the University of Illinois Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. IPRH had been awarded a $100,000 officer’s grant from the Mellon Foundation, and the committee aimed to create opportunities for multi-campus collaboration and opportunities for public engagement in the humanities.
“It was impressive that Dianne managed those early conversations in ways that shifted attention to publicly engaged practice, to thinking more about grad students,” said Teresa Mangum, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumna who received her PhD in English in 1990, and is the director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. The balance between public and private universities among consortium institutions was also distinctive. “Democracy isn't achieved by pretending people who have power don't have it.”
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Do you struggle with how to create an engaging PowerPoint presentation? Are you concerned that your PowerPoint puts people to sleep? What’s the right balance of text and images? What color schemes work best? Come to this Obermann Get It Done workshop with graphic designer and scholar Jeremy Swanston (Associate Professor and DGS, Graphic Design, School of Art and Art History) to learn how to create effective PowerPoints for all kinds of audiences and talks. | In supporting UI scholars and artists, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies organizes dozens of events each year. Over the years, we’ve learned a number of ways to build a lively, engaged audience. In this guide we created, you’ll find a timeline of recommended publicity activities, including bonus tasks for those with more time, funding, or people power. Our full list of suggestions may look imposing, but if you start by creating a timeline/checklist for the suggestions that make sense for your event and place reminders for to-do items on your calendar, you can do it! | |
