Less Seen/Less Heard: Conversations from the Margins is a periodic conversation series by the Activist Lab, in which experts discuss a range of pressing public health topics. This week, Craig Andrade, associate dean for practice and director of the Activist Lab at SPH, and Sophie Godley, clinical associate professor of community health sciences, talk about their shared experiences working with adolescents, queer youth, and other marginalized populations.

Listen to the full conversation here or read the transcript. For highlights, read the Q&A below.

Sophie Godley, clinical assistant professor of community health sciences, has focused her work at the intersection between poverty and sexual health since beginning her public health career in 1993.

Prior to joining the School of Public Health, Godley oversaw prevention and education programs as deputy director of the AIDS Action Committee, and also served the director of the Office of Adolescent Health and Youth Development at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

Now, at BU, Godley wears several hats, teaching both the Individual, Community, and Population Health (ICPH) core course in the MPH program and the Essentials of Public Health course to undergraduate students. She also serves as the director of undergraduate education at SPH, where she mentors students enrolled in the public health minor and the 4+1 program (SPH’s combined BA/MPH or BS/MPH program) and helps them carve out an academic and professional public health path that fits their interests.

“One of the reasons I absolutely adore the field of public health is that under every corner and in every single aspect, you can discover new areas of injustice and interest and opportunity,” she says.

Godley spoke more about her work, how public health and society, as a whole, can better support adolescents, and her love of teaching and mentoring future public health professionals with Craig Andrade, associate dean for practice and director of the Activist Lab at SPH, who has also spent much of his career working with adolescents and other marginalized populations.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Craig Andrade: Can you talk about what brought you to the field of public health in the first place and how that has informed your current work around adolescent and sexual health?

Sophie Godley: When I left undergrad, all I knew was that I wanted to help people and I wanted to do something about racism. That was about as specific as I could get at that point.

I began working at AIDS Action Committee, and I had the incredible opportunity to work with our volunteers. They often fell into two distinct categories: white, gay and bisexual men who were living with HIV, and Black women who were either living with HIV themselves or they had lost someone close to them to HIV.

While doing this work, I watched an unbelievable health disparity play out in real time, right in front of my eyes. The wealthier, white, gay men that I worked with were getting involved in clinical trials and taking part in the new antiretroviral therapies, while the more economically fragile, Black women were terrified—with good reason—to do these trials or therapies, and as a result were getting sicker and sicker.

It was such a contrast, and I went to public health school to figure that out. I wanted to know why this was happening, and what we could do about it because it was devastating to see what racism in medicine, what racism in healthcare, and what the legacy of Jim Crowe in Boston had done to get us to this point and how it was playing out in the medical setting with this terrible disease. It was so vivid to me. And honestly, that’s why I got my MPH.

Andrade: You have seen so many systemic inequities and disparities up close through your work. We are now in a moment, following the murder of George Floyd and so many other Black and Brown people, where a knee on the neck in front of the world helped people start to understand that these things are really happening and have been for decades. This marginalization and dismissal of people really drives my own public health practice. Can you talk more about what drives yours?

Godley: My mom is who I would most credit for my unwavering commitment to people of color, immigrants, migrants, and refugees. She was always a person who was committed and paid attention to people who were forgotten or unseen, and was often thinking and worrying about the world. And as much as I might have resisted it, especially in high school, I picked up on all of this from her, and it became part of who I am.

I firmly believe that if you are a person with great privilege, as I am and was, then you have an enormous obligation to pay attention, to read the hard stories, to watch the horrifying videos. You have an obligation to not look away. At first, I thought it was a burden to not look away, but it actually is a really incredible gift to feel this sense that, no matter what, we have a collective responsibility for how the world works and whether or not people are suffering.

For me, the commitment to antiracism, to paying attention, to constantly be assessing situations for equity and inequity, it never ends. There is always more work to do.

Andrade: I want to talk about the work you’ve done around adolescent health because it is less understood by many in all kinds of ways. In my own experience working with adolescents, I’ve learned much about their resilience, their refusal to let go of their value of fairness, and of how they often just want to be heard in a world that seems to only value adult perspectives. What do you think society can do to better support our adolescents and really begin to bring their voices to the table?

Godley: For me, the joy and beauty of adolescent health is that adolescents are a mercurial group; they are constantly evolving and changing. Working in this space has been all about figuring out how we can translate what we have learned in research into concrete advice that communities and schools can use to better support young people and help them navigate a tricky time in their life that ultimately carries both enormous potential and risk.

Throughout my career, I have often had the experience of sitting on a panel and having a scientist or researcher next to me discuss the “great tragedy of queer youth.” The story goes something along the lines of these are downtrodden, mentally ill, substance using, messy, homeless disasters. They tell an incredible description of suffering.

But—to no one’s surprise—this makes me really, really angry. In my experience, queer kids are creative, they’re funny, they are irreverent, they are revolutionary, and they don’t care what you think. The have so much to offer. They have so many strengths. And yes, they also often have enormous health risks and enormous challenges they are facing, but that is not the only thing about them.

I think we really need to talk about communities in a way that doesn’t focus only on the detriment, but also highlights the resilience. And if we want to learn from young people and make space for them at the table, we need to step up and step back. I think we’ve gotten better at stepping up over the years, but I think there is a lot of people that still need to learn how to step back.

Andrade: I could not end this conversation without highlighting that you are one of the most decorated professors that SPH has ever had. That is fact, and it is because of how you transform the classroom experience for our students. Could you talk more about your philosophy around teaching and mentoring our future public health professionals?

Godley: It is such an honor to get to do what I do. Over the last few years, I’ve really started to focus on disrupting this notion that classrooms have to be sterile environments and that relationships between faculty and students have to be transactional. I want to show students that you can have this career that is endlessly fascinating and endlessly interesting and endlessly challenging, and you can actually make like a real difference in people’s lives. Like, what an incredible privilege?

I also really think that what students appreciate most is that they truly believe that I care about their success, and I really do! It has been my honor to mentor people, especially those young people of color who have not had a lot of cheerleading in their lives. Being able to see people’s potential and their talents and fan those flames, even a little bit, can really make a big difference in building up confidence and self-worth. It is such a joy to see that spark in someone. It is so rewarding, and I am so lucky.