Ryan Petteway Presents at 2025 APHA Annual Meeting on Epistemological Racism in Epidemiology
Ryan Petteway, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor of Community Health & Health Promotion at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, recently presented at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA) in Washington, D.C., one of the largest and most influential public health gatherings in the world.
Dr. Petteway’s presentation, “Confounded: Epistemological Racism & Three Ethical Deficiencies of Dominant Epidemiology Paradigms,” examined how epistemological racism, an often unnamed but deeply entrenched dimension of structural racism, shapes public health knowledge production, training, and practice. His work challenges the ways in which White supremacy and settler colonialism influence what is considered knowledge in epidemiology, whose voices are centered, and which ways of knowing are validated or erased.
Drawing from critical, antiracist, Black feminist, and decolonial theoretical traditions, Dr. Petteway outlined how dominant epidemiologic paradigms frequently rely on extractive methods and reductionist representations that marginalize community knowledge, obscure racialized power dynamics, and reinforce claims of “objectivity” and “neutrality” that mask researcher positionality. He highlighted how these norms perpetuate what he describes as “colorblind” racism, particularly in research on racial health inequities.
The presentation identified three core ethical deficiencies produced by unmitigated epistemological racism within epidemiology: epistemic justice, procedural justice, and distributive justice. Dr. Petteway argued that these deficiencies collectively undermine public health ethics, constrain collective imagination, and limit the field’s capacity for meaningful social action.
In response, the session outlined a praxis of resistance toward a more critical and transformative public health ethics. Dr. Petteway offered counternarratives to the misrepresentations, omissions, and silences within the epidemiologic canon, calling for shifts across multiple public health domains. This includes research epistemologies and methods, training and accreditation standards, funding structures, and peer-review and dissemination practices. His work challenges the field to move toward more just, community-centered approaches to understanding health, healing, and well-being.
Dr. Petteway’s presentation reflects the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health’s commitment to advancing health equity and reimagining public health education and research in ways that are accountable to communities most impacted by health inequities.