Abstract
Health Promotion Practice (HPP) began as kind of a radical idea: a scholarly journal publishing authoritative research alongside shorter practical articles organized by departments with names like “Tools of the Trade” and “Evaluation in Practice.” Would practitioners write for a journal? Would researchers submit to a practice-oriented publication? Would there be enough quality content to establish a following and reach critical publishing metrics? The founding vision challenged professional and publishing norms, but the response was immediate and clear. There was indeed a community for this kind of journal and a wealth of inquiry-oriented health promotion practice around the world.
20 for 20: The HPP List
Recently, I had the opportunity to curate a list of 20 for 20,—20 articles reflecting HPP’s 20-year anniversary. As I revisited every article in the HPP catalog, I was moved by the accumulated wisdom of this radical practice. From the first article on the list—the seminal photovoice article by Caroline Wang, Jennifer Cash, and Lisa Powers (2000)—through the final entry—the English and Spanish versions of Alfgier Kristjansson and colleagues’ article presenting the development and guiding principles of the Icelandic Model for Preventing Adolescent Substance Use (Kristjansson et al., 2020a, 2020b)—this list is pretty amazing. Since my task was to showcase the collective strength and diversity of HPP’s authors, populations, topics, settings, and methods over 20 years, not all of my personal favorites made the cut. I invite you to check it out (https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/topic/collections-hpp/hpp-1-20_asc/hpp), discover new articles, and maybe even re-read some you thought you knew.
The 20 titles alone are fun to read, as they chart our field’s progress through emerging topics and game-changing aha’s. You’ll see the moment when a big idea first appeared on our pages: community-based participatory research to address health disparities (Wallerstein & Duran, 2006), harnessing social media for health promotion and behavior change (Korda & Itani, 2013), using the arts to heal trauma (Rowe et al., 2017), analyzing sworn declarations and border documents to explore the needs of transgender asylum seekers (Gowin et al., 2017), and the arrival of JUUL at school (Schillo et al., 2020). While the trend was still to drill down to individual knowledge and “lifestyle choices,” you’ll see how HPP authors pulled up to context: analyzing settings (Poland et al., 2009), working conditions of low-wage workers (Nobrega et al., 2016), environmental influences on tobacco use among Asian American and Pacific Islander youth (Tanjasiri et al., 2013), and corner store and wholesaler interventions (Schwendler et al., 2017). Some of the more recent articles were selected to represent approaches that thread through HPP’s pages over the second decade: barbershop interventions (Jemmott et al., 2017), community health workers (Lohr et al., 2018), implementation research (Livingood et al., 2020), community–academic partnerships (Pearson et al., 2019), and digital storytelling (Fiddian-Green et al., 2019).
When I started this project, I was concerned that perhaps HPP’s early articles, while historically interesting, might be outdated and less relevant today. I was wrong. Re-reading evergreen work, like Sandra Quinn’s model for community building capacity and resilience as precursor to effective risk communication in a pandemic (Quinn, 2008) or Perry Stevens, Lisa Carlson, and Joanna Hinman’s landmark paper analyzing the tobacco industry’s aggressive marketing to LGBT populations (Stevens et al., 2004), reminded me that what we need to be effective in these times we already know—it’s there in the words and prescient vision of our earliest authors.
The list rounds out with two articles that foreshadow our 2021 commitments. We will continue to publish articles and commentaries that address equity, inclusion, and racial justice, building on the work of Mary Lee and Amanda Navarro (2018) on prioritizing racial equity, and we will expand our efforts to honor the full story of a paper’s journey, as we did when we published our first paper in Spanish (Juárez-Carillo et al., 2017, 2018). As evidenced by this list and the hundreds of authors and papers they represent, HPP’s pole star shines brightly, even as the night sky seems so much darker these days.
Where We Are Now
It seems that we are living in a time of numbers—COVID cases, COVID deaths; weeks then months at home; money left in the bank or wallet; acres burned, days until an election. For some, the count is oddly centering, recalibrating previously overscheduled lives by tracking new social media followers, hours on Zoom, birds at the feeder, steps logged, recipes tried. But for others, this count marks the true meaning of this time—how many pets and boxes will fit in the car, hours waiting in line to vote, receive food, get a COVID test; days since a hug, weeks since goodbye, months without a funeral, people killed by guns, police violence, despair.
This is also a time of strong currents. Around the world, powerful forces tap into fear, resentment, and grievance. Lost lives and livelihoods are callously ignored while the fortunes of a very few soar. Grief abounds and yet is denied a place in the story being written about this time. For months, I have feared that we are rapidly moving to an unimaginable event horizon. Can a little journal do anything to redirect this momentum? Yes, we can.
What We Will Publish
Moving into our third decade, HPP will continue to publish our signature mix of practice-relevant research and commentary. We will prioritize work that counters complacency and contributes to broader discussions of equity, antiracism, and “a public health of consequence” (Galea & Vaughan, 2019). We will open our pages to new forms of expression that can shape and inspire our science. We started this past year with Collins Airhihenbuwa’s essay “From 1619 to COVID-19” (2020) and the dialogue between Ella Greene-Moton and Meredith Minkler (2020) on the false choice between cultural competence and cultural humility. We seek to bring forward methods of inquiry that are nuanced and generative, nurturing trust and collective efficacy, infusing context with meaningful change and practical solutions. You will see that in a spring Supplement dedicated to the vibrant intersection of the arts and public health, a summer focus issue on critical narrative intervention, and early in 2022, a full issue devoted to the methodology and future directions of photovoice. We welcome submissions of original, critical work that transforms private troubles into public issues (Mills, 1959) with actionable implications and new insights.
Radical practice means that we will redouble our commitment to peer review as a respectful, capacity-building experience for authors and reviewers alike, no matter the publication outcome. With extensive input from authors and reviewers, we have revised our reviewer forms to make the questions and criteria transparent to potential authors and more helpful to reviewers. We have updated our Author Guidelines https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/author-instructions/HPP) to clarify the HPP process and expectations, drawing attention to the power of words (Roe & Mata, 2019) and the importance of removing violence, shaming, and stigma from our language. We will continue to expand our resources for potential authors. There should be nothing mysterious or deliberately exclusive about finding your voice, developing an idea, working it through rounds of peer review and revision, and locating the right journal home.
Sharing What and Who We Publish
From a radical practice perspective, what we publish becomes meaningful only when read and used by others. Most readers access HPP content through their SOPHE memberships or library/organizational subscriptions. Let us know if you need ideas for “making the case” for an institutional subscription! Although we are not an open access journal, you can find a growing list of articles that are open to the public for free download at our SAGE website (https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/home/hpp). We will continue to “open” papers for time-limited promotions, such as our annual PRIDE and Native American Heritage collections in June and November, respectively. In the past year, we were proud to be included in SAGE Publications’ two special microsites—one on COVID-19 and the other on structural racism and police violence—in which all articles were opened to free access for all. Please share these links widely so that HPP authors reach as many people as possible.
You may have noticed that HPP significantly expanded its social media presence in 2020. Twitter (@TheHPPJournal) and our LinkedIn page (Health Promotion Practice Journal) allow us to bring notice of who is publishing in HPP and what they are writing about to an exponentially larger audience. Our social media team strives to pair engaging images with short but compelling text that contributes to the conversation far beyond the confines of the journal. We hope that social media users will click on the links and access our content. But we also believe that merely telling the world what our authors are doing contributes, on a broader level, to our collective confidence in what is possible. We dedicate time and careful attention to HPP’s social media as a bridge to a universe of people that we may never know but may be inspired and reassured by an image and 280 characters about our authors and their work.
Telling A Bigger Story
During the long #StayHome months of 2020, a dedicated group of HPP interns and I, with invaluable guidance from Deputy Editor Frank Strona, developed an ever-expanding collection of supplemental content for selected HPP articles. We had several potential users in mind—time-pressed faculty who want to refresh their courses with new or late-breaking articles, Zoom-weary students who may be tempted to skip that assigned HPP reading, community partners for whom a published article is more of an abstraction rather than an easily shared point of pride. We had three primary goals. First, we wanted to experiment with telling “the stories behind the stories”—for example, how a project got started or what has happened since the article was written. Next, we wanted to offer different “ways in” to our content—such as colorful one-page summaries and article lists that pop off the screen with engaging images. Most importantly, we wanted to provide space for HPP authors to reflect on their lives and lifework, confident that their stories will connect with and inspire potential practitioner or scholar authors who, maybe still in the precontemplation stage, might see someone like themselves, hear the rhythm of language that they recognize, or a path they know well in an HPP podcast or recorded conversation. You can find examples of our HPP Infographics, curated Reading Lists, Article Snapshots, Author Conversations, People and Places video podcast, and more at our interns’ website: www.healthpromotionpracticenotes.com. Special thank you to the “#StayHome2020” interns Arden Castle, Yovanna Gonzalez, Kathryn Houk, Brandon Nguyen, Kaela Nguyen, Lai Saechao, and Ashlyn Vargas. Your creativity and output were astounding.
As We Go Forward
Radical practice operates from a place of abundance. As challenging as these days have been, our journal is strong. We can use that strength to tune our actions to the potential of this moment, the “fierce urgency of now” (King, 1967). Like a practitioner of qigong, we can hold the moon, drawing energy from what is around us to release the calm and steady life force within us. That is our place of abundance and the potential of radical practice. Let’s see what our journal can do.
