Bryce Puesta Takenaka, MPH

I am Bryce Puesta Takenaka, a queer, disabled, second-generation Filipino and Japanese writer, artist, PhD student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, and a T32 Research Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. Born on the Mokupuni of O'ahu, Hawai'i, and raised in the Liliha-Kapalama and Ewa Beach neighborhoods, both continue to undergo momentous urban neighborhood changes. 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, urbanism, and environmental injustice on queer and transgender health. I am constantly drawn to questions and debates that contend how Black and Pasifika Indigenous queer and transgender geographies are created, represented, occupied, shared, transformed, and imagined as they coalesce alongside movements toward anti-racist, anti-colonial, de-militarized, and abolitionist futures and possibilities that serve our lāhui (Nation to the Hawaiian Kingdom).

'A‘ohe pau ke ‘ike ka hālau ho‘okahi (all knowledge is not learned in a single place). I lean into transnational epistemologies to usher creative participatory and radical spatial practices to illuminate the contours and the ways colonial and racial violence constantly recalibrate through the built environment and how these modes of spatial production have progressed into skewed health inequities and environmental injustices. 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.