Thread by @societyforepi

Next up: I’ll talk about where my ideas come from and suggestions for goosing your #IdeaMachine. 1/n
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My first recommendation is a big, long-term one.
But today’s as good a day as any to start the rest of your life, right?!
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First, I recommend choosing a population of interest and learning *a lot* about it.
After all, #Epitwitter is all about the health of populations, right? 3/n
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I’m just not talking about the traditional risk factors deemed relevant for an exposure-disease association (by definition, those have already been identified and studied)… 4/n
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I’m suggesting that you intentionally absorb info about the history, demographics, occupations, jokes, art, interests, political priorities, genetic flows, geographic distributions, changes over time … 5/n #RobinsonTwitterTakeover

Although I’m pretty omnivorous when it comes to populations, my chosen population is descendants of Africans who were enslaved in the United States, especially those who live in the contemporary U.S. South (#BlackEpiMatters) 6/10
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Your population could be any group whose interests will engage you for the longterm: all the gender-queer people who live in the Upper Midwest or Mayflower descendants in the Virginia suburbs or the global diaspora of Sikh people 7/10
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What matters is that you are motivated to explore and consider all aspects of this community’s life. Because, in this community, you will observe deviations from your expectations based on the dominant paradigms in your field… 8/10
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You will observe that the people in this community will have different concerns and priorities than your colleagues… 9/10
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You will even observe that the received wisdom in your field doesn’t actually seem right in some ways when applied to your population. More later on how this has manifested in my own work. 10/10
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