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Welcome to the Pioneers in Health podcast. In this podcast, we share inspiring stories of pioneering leaders from our nation and from your backyard who are working to improve health.
In episode 60, we interview Dr. Jamila Michener. She is a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University. She studies poverty, racism and public policy, with a particular focus on health and housing. She is author of “Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics” (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and “Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power” (Princeton University Press, 2026). She is co-editor of Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis (Sage Publications, 2024). She is the inaugural director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures and senior associate dean for public engagement at the Brooks School of Public Policy. She also co-hosts and co-edits a podcast/multimodal online platform called Futures Forum.
She works closely with community-based organizations around the country to apply research insights to address urgent problems facing racially and economically marginalized communities.
Prior to working at Cornell, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at the University of Michigan. She received her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago and her undergraduate degree from Princeton University.
In this episode, she shares how her childhood helped shape her future work in poverty, racism and public policy. She grew up in low-income Black and Brown communities in New York City. Her parents were immigrants who had low-wage working class jobs who worked hard to take care of their family. She grew up really attentive to the dynamics of inequality.
“In a city like New York City, which is where I grew up, you don’t have to look far to see people who live really differently than you do and to recognize that there are differences that seem somewhat arbitrary,” Jamila said. “You know, my parents worked really hard, but it didn’t seem like we had access to the same things that other people did. So I was always asking questions. I was always wondering why things were the way they were.”
As she progressed through college and different stages of adulthood, she homed in on a path that would allow her not only just ask questions about why things were the way they were, but also to answer those questions and to try and do something about them.
In this episode, she also discusses:
- The importance of Medicaid to the health of people
- Why she focuses her research on Medicaid
- How interviewing people using Medicaid improved her understanding of the program
- How states implement the Medicaid program differently and how that affects people’s lives
- How health is connected to democracy
- The growing trend of additional paperwork requirements for Medicaid participants
- The important role the civil justice system plays
- Her two novels, “Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power” and “Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics”
- The justice gap and unequal access to legal representation
- What gives her hope
- What’s next for her work and research
And much more! Listen now, and learn more about how Jamila is an innovative leader in healthcare.
Please see the Pioneers in Health page on our website for more information on our podcast series and links to other episodes.
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