Papers by Kai River Blevins
Journal of Veterans Studies
Veteran communities including veterans, their families, and their caregivers are vital collaborat... more Veteran communities including veterans, their families, and their caregivers are vital collaborators in the field of veterans studies. Veteran community engaged research (CEnR) generates findings that are impactful and applicable to target populations. Veteran CEnR is a valuable emerging methodological approach. In the two decades since 9/11, clinical and health services researchers have increasingly prioritized participatory veteran research designs. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the important application of veteran CEnR to the development of a US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) research agenda that tackles a nuanced subject-veteran community reintegration. The Enhancing Veteran Community Reintegration Research (ENCORE) project includes a multi-stakeholder partnership (MSP) that engages veterans, families and caregivers, VA program directors, leaders in veteran community reintegration research, and representatives from community based veteran service organizations. Veteran CEnR was used as an approach to co-author this article with MSP research partners. Contributions from MSP volunteer authors are woven throughout the article to illustrate the organization and functioning of the MSP and impact of this type of stakeholder engagement throughout the project.
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
Background and aimsResearch into the social aspects of set and setting have demonstrated that rac... more Background and aimsResearch into the social aspects of set and setting have demonstrated that race is a significant factor in psychedelic experiences for racially marginalized populations. Yet, many studies of psychedelic-induced experiences continue to proceed without collecting data on or considering the influence of race or other social categories. These approaches abstract subjectivity from its embodied and historical conditions, isolating consciousness in ways that do not accord with lived experience.MethodsThis article draws on critical phenomenology, anthropology, and treatments of race in the field of psychedelic studies to outline how social categories mediate subjective experience in historically specific ways through the framework of embodiment.ResultsI argue that consciousness is fundamentally intersubjective, including during psychedelic-induced experiences. Intersubjectivity is an existential condition that makes possible meaning, communication, and socialization, proc...
Journal of Military, Veteran and Family Health
LAY SUMMARY Minority Veterans in the United States are often excluded, whether intentionally or n... more LAY SUMMARY Minority Veterans in the United States are often excluded, whether intentionally or not, from public policy initiatives, leading to approaches that attempt to account for, or include, minority Veterans after the policy process has begun rather than at the foundational stages. This leads to policies and programs that do not adequately serve or that may harm minority Veteran communities. Drawing on their work with the U.S. Senate and House Veterans’ Affairs Committees and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the authors outline four principles for equitable Veteran public policy to better support minority Veterans and their communities. These principles are grounded in intersectionality theory, a framework that starts from the recognition that everyone has multiple identities and that these identities relate to the inequalities one experiences personally and systemically. The authors hope these principles contribute to more equitable public policy analyses and practice...
Transgender individuals are heavily regulated through American law, particularly through the admi... more Transgender individuals are heavily regulated through American law, particularly through the administrative state, which presents challenges in terms of housing, identity documents, prisons, and immigration, among others. There are many determinative factors which create this trans-antagonistic administrative framework, and I investigate two key norms – gender essentialism and cisnormativity. These norms are (re)produced and naturalized through the mutually enforcing epistemological frameworks of law and medicine through their competing projects of bringing transgender individuals under their authority in such a way as to hierarchize transgender communities and identities. This paper explores how these conceptual frameworks undergird the administrative state's theorization of gender, the ways in which the law is guided in the regulation of transgender individuals, the epistemological framework of the medical model employed by the law in realizing those norms, and how the administration of these regulations disciplines the transition processes of transgender individuals. My analysis contributes to the work of Dean Spade, Ian Haney López, and other critical legal scholars by explicating the nature and function of the law in the lives of transgender individuals with respect to gender essentialism and cisnormativity. Through interrogating these norms as a framework upon which the administrative state is constructed, I advance the concept of the self-determination model and make recommendations to increase the personal and collective autonomy of transgender individuals with respect to their transition processes.
While “sanctuary” policies are an important step toward protecting undocumented immigrants and th... more While “sanctuary” policies are an important step toward protecting undocumented immigrants and their families from the violence of detention and removal, they have significant limits. The general principle behind sanctuary is non-cooperation with federal immigration authorities. However, there is a common exception to this principle when an individual is arrested or charged with criminal conduct, and this exception is incorporated in Oregon’s statewide sanctuary statute. O.R.S. § 181A.820. Dean Spade and Ian Haney Lopez both address the biopolitics of the law through systems of race, gender, and class, among other factors, revealing the limits of law in addressing injustice and the violence of legal institutions. In this paper, I will examine the ways in which sanctuary policy fails to address the false neutrality of the law, particularly through its “criminal” exception, thereby reifying racialized-gendered systems of subjection and the maldistribution of life chances.
Conceptions of self-injury, also known as self-harm, have undergone important social changes over... more Conceptions of self-injury, also known as self-harm, have undergone important social changes over the last few decades. While self-injury is not a contemporary behavior, the contemporary world has shaped how self-injuring persons (known as “practitioners”) conceptualize this behavior and situate it in their lives. Although self-injurious behavior appears with greater frequency in youth, it exists across age groups, class groups, races, and, as will be the focus of this research, genders and sexual identities (Adler and Adler, 2011). The vast majority of research and analysis on self-injury comes from the psycho-medical community. Though this research is useful as a means of contextualizing the social phenomenon of self-injury, it not only limits understandings of the social nature of self-injurious behavior, but also the cultural processes whereby self-injury is given meaning. A sociological approach allows for a greater understanding of its social and cultural aspects beyond the individual. Existing sociological research demonstrates that self-injury is powerfully gendered and that the gendered nature of self-injury is located in social and cultural factors (Adler and Adler, 2011). Yet there is comparatively little research into self-injury in transgender and queer communities. This research attempts to broaden understandings of self-injury in transgender and queer communities by asking the following research questions: (1) How are transgender and queer people describing self-injury? (2) How do these narratives represent their positionality and identity? and (3) How are these narratives linked to experiences of gender and sexuality?
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Papers by Kai River Blevins