Bryce Puesta Takenaka, MPH

scholar-activist | queer & trans health justice | social epidemiologist

I am Bryce Puesta Takenaka, a queer, second-generation Filipino and Japanese writer, 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 of which 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.

How I’ve arrived here…

From the mauka to makai

I’ve arrived here through a convoluted path that began in pre-gentrified Liliha and Kalihi-Kapālama to the ahupua’a of Honouliuli (present-day Ewa Beach) on the Island of O’ahu, Hawai’i. Soon after, I found myself crossing the Pacific to Ogden, Utah, and not long after transiting to St. Charles, Missouri. Remaining in the St. Louis area for post-grad was met with a farewell and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. I come from and belong to many places, and I have a habit of seeing the world and occupying it through these peripheries.

My interest in the interplay between geography, technology, and health can be traced back to the crossroads of my lineage, where my family immigrated from the Philippines and Japan during different periods of Hawai’i’s colonial Plantation migration. Now residing in the U.S. illegally occupied Hawai’i on the Islands of O’ahu and Maui, their stories of movement and the spaces they’ve created ignited my inquisitiveness of how these geographies are shared. My ‘ohana is where my intellectual genealogy began, the soil that continues to nourish my scholarship on the entanglements of ethnorace, sexuality, gender, class, location, and health, the pinnacle to most questions and curiosity that come to me naturally. They showed me the way to imagine (and re-imagine), to challenge how things are often done, that innovation is a quotidian thing, and that anyone and everyone is capable of creating and sharing those tools.