Meet Lucia Vitale

Lucia Vitale is an interdisciplinary global health scholar who uses comparative methods to study the political side of primary health care in border areas. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also an OBMICA associate researcher and a Fulbright fellow.

1. Can you tell us about a project you are currently working on or have worked on recently?

• I am currently in the data collection stage for my dissertation in the Department of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My dissertation, a multiscalar project, deals with access to health services in the Dominican Republic's border area with Haiti. At the transnational scale, I interview NGO staff, doctors, representatives of international organizations such as UN agencies or the World Bank, and bilateral assistance organizations such as USAID. At the national scale, I interview politicians, ministers, and private-sector actors in the capital cities of Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince. The local scale is made up of four border communities, two on the Dominican side and two on the Haitian side. There I use three main tools: (1) a questionnaire to measure the average access a community has to health services, (2) focus groups divided by gender and nationality to define concepts and identify differences between groups, and (3) interviews with community leaders to deepen issues noted in the questionnaires and focus groups.

1. What has been the most interesting thing about that project and how does it apply to your professional practice?

• What has been most interesting so far is noticing differences in how people navigate health services in a system fragmented among public services, private services, NGO-provided services, and medical outreach operations. At the same time, one can see the agency people have and also the structures each person must navigate in order to piece together a set of services for themselves and their families. I understand that every time an individual accesses a health service, a political relationship is created, made up of an entity that has responsibility and an entity that has rights. The way people manage these relationships, with NGO projects, medical outreach operations, public clinics, and so on, teaches us a great deal about the dichotomy between seeing health as a right of citizenship or as a human right. This will be extremely important in the coming decades as migration rises between middle- and low-income countries.

1. What do you like most about what you do?

• Every day I have the great honor of researching a topic, access to health services, about which I feel infinitely curious. Above all, I feel very grateful when I am in rural areas and people share their experiences with me, trust me, and take time for a coffee, a walk, or simply spending time together.

1. What are the biggest challenges you face?

• Challenges? Always funding for my research. It is not easy to gather the resources needed to carry out a project, and having to constantly look for opportunities and prepare applications is tedious.
• I would say another challenge is the level of emotional energy one must have when researching topics such as health. When someone shares testimony with me about their situation of vulnerability, I reciprocate. I have completed training on how to interview responsibly and in a trauma-informed way.

1. What do you hope to achieve through your professional work?

• For me, research and teaching are two callings in life. There are no words to describe the joy of learning something new in the field or of being the person who introduces a new idea or way of seeing the world to someone just beginning university. So, after earning my doctorate, I hope to become a professor.