Inequalities at work: health care workers and clients in a community clinic

My dissertation is a study of health care workers and clients in a private, not-for-profit health care center. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews I analyze how workers at a community clinic reproduce or respond to inequalities of race, class, and gender in their interactions with each other and in their daily work with poor clients, especially Latinas/os. As a symbolic interactionist and feminist ethnographer, I studied how health care providers came to act as they did as well as the consequences of their behavior for their clients, other staff, and themselves. I identify how inequality was reproduced, including the interactions, roles, identities, meanings, and emotions that were central to the people at the clinic. In Chapter 1, I explore how the Black female staff draw on racialized and gendered rhetorics to criticize and claim status over Latinas. These rhetorics followed from the discourses constructed and used by white elites to reinforce racism and sexism. Black women used these rhetorics as a way to respond to the changes in the racial make-up of clients and the accompanying hiring of bilingual staff, mostly Latinas. Similarly, Latinas used images of pushy, bossy, and "uppity Black women" against the Black staff. I argue that these strategies divided low-status workers. In Chapter 2, I examine how the Maternity Care Coordinators (MCCs) maintained a moral identity as good health care providers. The MCCs defined Latinas as the "neediest of the needy" and "Americans" as the privileged clients. They thought differently about the Latina, Black, and white women they served. In Chapter 3, I explore how the white high-status staff's solidarity-talk kept them from seeing the significance of race in interactions among staff members. The rhetoric used largely by the white high-status staff protected them from having to "see" their own race and did not help Latina and Black staff develop solidarity. Finally, in the conclusion I highlight how the staff might have come to recognize racism, sexism, and class inequality if organizational arrangements had been different

Community-responsive scholar-activist research: conceptualizing capacity building and sustainability in a Northern California community-university partnership

We critically examine the ongoing development of a collaborative, responsive, activist research process between academics and farmworkers. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with community-based researchers and scholar-activists, we assess our team's understanding of community capacity building and research sustainability as the conceptual and operational definitions of these concepts lack academic consensus. The definitions we present reflect a 12-year effort to respond to community needs through interdisciplinary research, planning, and action. Our community-university team's evolving understanding of community capacity building and research sustainability is contextualized by our community-driven, community-responsive, and collaborative process. We discuss strengths and limitations encountered when conducting community-responsive, scholar-activist research and conclude by offering the lessons learned

Appendix Consent Form.docx

Consent form appendix for Cultivating university students' critical sense of belonging through community-responsive scholar-activism. </p

Appendix Survey Questions.docx

Survey question appendix for Cultivating university students' critical sense of belonging through community-responsive scholar-activism.</p

Appendix Report Back Examples of Student Comments.docx

Report back appendix for Cultivating university students' critical sense of belonging through community-responsive scholar-activism.</p