Research
My research focus is on the intersectionality of gender, race, and class in Mental Health policy, training, program planning and development, implementation, and evaluation. Much of the literature on cultural diversity, or other forms of diversity, pay little, if any regard to the particular needs of women. Similarly, until recent times, much of the feminist literature was limited by a failure to recognize the diverse experiences of women. In the context of education, and in many other contexts, an examination of the nexus of such categories with that of gender is crucial. In academic literature, this nexus is sometimes referred to as intersectionality. My independent scholarly work with intersectionality as a tool tends to be more theoretical at this stage. The intersectionality paradigm articulates the workings of various structured systems of inequality in the production of racialized and sexualized stereotypes and images, subjectivity, intentionality, intersubjectivity, positionality, psychic privilege,
rankings in the social order, contradictory social categories, and struggles against hegemonic constraints. Domestic violence in the Black community is an excellent and substantive issue for studying the parameters of the intersectionality paradigm. I have been developing a metadisciplinary ecological model of the intersectionality of gender, race, and class to inform the domestic violence curriculum of the next generation of policy makers, legal scholars, and health care professionals. A synopsis of this project can be found online as a SACES 2003 IDEA Exchange Handout at:
http://www.ulm.edu/~mft/download.html#anchor1778005
Besides taking a metadisciplinary perspective, I also believe in using multi-method approaches when appropriate. For example, I have introduced intersectionality theory into the proceedings of chiefly empirical conferences, such as the International Society for Prevention Research, to increase awareness of the impact of disparities in transnational economic trade on Mexican migrant families in Tennessee. I have also brought quantitative analysis into the International Congresses of the Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, a mainly qualitative setting, in a presentation entitled “Neoliberal Policy and Domestic Violence,” in Florence, Italy.
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TBA