Bryce Puesta Takenaka, MPH

I am a PhD student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health and a Research Fellow at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation at Yale School of Medicine. Moving through an occupied Hawai'i formed my research interests in grappling with the afterlives of settler colonialism, imperialism, racial capitalism, U.S. militarism, tourism, carceral systems, and environmental justice on health. I am constantly drawn to questions and debates that contend how geographies are created, represented, occupied, shared, transformed, and imagined as they coalesce with movements toward anti-racist, anti-colonial, de-militarized, and abolitionist futures. I lean into community-driven and transnational epistemologies to inform participatory and radical spatial practices for alternatives to state-sanctioned violence. I earned a Master of Arts (MA) in History of Science and Medicine from Yale University, a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology from the College for Public Health and Social Justice at Saint Louis University and a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from Lindenwood University.