Research Group on Race and Racial Inequality

Participants in October 26, 2007 Roundtable

 

In October of 2007, faculty from the University of Vermont in concert with Marsh Professor-at-Large William Darity, Jr convened a research group with interests in issues of race and race inequality. Faculty from Middlebury College joined this group as well.

 

The group is multidisciplinary, and includes creative writers, artists, social scientists, and those from the humanities. The purpose of this conclave is to share preliminary research ideas, plans, and methodology and to discuss results of investigations, all with the goal of obtaining feedback on our scholarly and creative work in the area of race and ethnicity. Ideally, we might also generate synergies in research/creative work and potentially grant funding. The group is open to those and those with an interest in attending these sessions should contact or desiring more information about this group should contact Stephanie Seguino at Stephanie.Seguino@uvm.edu or 802.656.0187.

 

A Spring 2008 meeting of the research group is planned for April 5, from 2pm to 5pm. Please contact Stephanie Seguino or consult this website for further details on this and future meetings.

Lisa Bass

Bio

Lisa Bass is a post doctoral fellow at the University of Vermont. Her research focus is on school reform, ethics, comparative and international issues, and social and cultural issues. She is interested in the impact of race and racial identity on the above. 

Lisa.Bass@uvm.edu

 

Research

"The Ethic of Diversity."  Diversity is often broadly looked at as a choice or something that is a nice thing to support. The paper seeks to examine the issues surrounding diversity, assimilation, and pluralism in the American school system through a new ethical lens. A new conceptual model is introduced, building on the works of Starrett (1994, 2003); Shapiro and Stefkovich (2001); and Furman (2003). By making diversity an ethic, several concerns are addressed as the assumptions underlying the ethic are put into practice. A model will be used to illustrate the ethic of diversity.

"Boarding Schools and Capital Benefits:  Student Experience in United States and South African Schools."  The capital benefits study looks at the impact of the boarding school environment on students' exposure to social, cultural, and education capital. I focus on the experiences of students of color and those who are otherwise disadvantaged in this study.

 

Emily Bernard

Bio

Emily Bernard is an Associate Professor of English and ALANA U. S. Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont.  Her interests include interracial dynamics in American literature and culture. 

Emily.Bernard@uvm.edu

Research

"Teaching and Being: Essays on Race, Intimacy, and the Classroom."  Authors of color are regularly featured on our syllabi, and the canon is constantly being interrogated and revised in an attempt to address its inherent biases and assumptions. At the same time, the advances achieved by Brown v. Board are quickly being eradicated.  These recent setbacks in desegregation will ensure that our schools will not be as diverse as our syllabi for a very long time.  This book, a collection of essays, utilizes the structure of autobiography in order to investigate the complex character of the American classroom in the 21st century, in which race and diversity are prominently featured in the discourse around education at the same time that our school systems become effectively more and more segregated.

Erik Bleich

Bio

Erik Bleich is Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College.  His research focuses on West European state responses to the challenges of racism and ethnic diversity. 

ebleich@middlebury.edu

 

Research

"Making it Hard to Hate: Limiting Freedom in the Name of Cohesion."  Freedom of association and expression are core values in liberal democracies.  Yet since the end of the Second World War, and especially since the 1980s, such freedoms have been progressively curtailed in the name of another important social value:  promoting community cohesion, defined as the protection of minority racial, ethnic, and religious groups from acts designed to isolate or denigrate them.  This study traces the development of this trend over time, details significant exceptions and disparities across countries, and accounts for these outcomes.  It argues that citizens need to be acutely aware of the trade-offs their leaders make when developing new laws, and concludes that the restrictions on freedom of association and expression are troubling, but that restrained enforcement has enabled states to maintain a workable balance between protecting freedom and promoting community cohesion.

Pablo Bose

Bio
Pablo Bose is a George Washington Henderson and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography. His ongoing interest is on issues of culture, space and power and focuses on the study of diasporas, transnational relationships, and social justice.

Pablo.Bose@uvm.edu

Research
"Mapping Difference: Diasporic South Asian Communities in Canada and the US." This study looks at processes of postcolonial diasporic identity formation by examining the
experiences of migration, settlement, acculturation, and exclusion within immigrant South Asian communities in North America.  In particular, it looks at how identities within diasporic communities might be formed in relation to diverse iterations of the same.  In other words, how might an immigrant community conceive of its identity in terms of a related group within another host country?  Moreover, how have dominant conceptions of what I term the "mythic global Indian" -- often located within the North American experience -- been mobilized within broader racial politics in a range of spaces?  A second project related to these interests is "Transportation, Equity, and Communities at Risk: Refugee Populations and Transportation Accessibility in Vermont", which will look at issues of transportation equity and marginalized communities in Vermont.

Meghan Cope

Bio

Meghan Cope is Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at UVM. Her areas of interest are intersections of identity, power, and space, particularly in the context of US cities. 

Meghan.Cope@uvm.edu

 

Research

Meghan is currently analyzing data from a participatory research project done with children (ages 6-13) on the West Side of Buffalo, NY, a racially diverse, low-income area of the city. Her main interests are in how children conceptualize urban space, including both the built environment and socially constructed spaces. In the discursive narratives of depressed urban centers of the US 'rust belt', children of color are routinely viewed as indicators of all that the city has suffered under economic restructuring and the disciplinary political regimes of neoliberalism. That is, young people of color are perceived as the embodied tailings of such 'problems' as the out-migration of whites, the loss of industrial labor, welfare dependency, drugs and violent crime, dilapidated neighborhoods, and empty city coffers. In contrast, children's artistic, verbal, and photographic representations of their city are nuanced, diverse, savvy, contradictory, and based on lived experience of the everyday, suggesting that looking at the city 'from the ground up' may hold clues to its future.

 

Nick Danigelis

Bio

Nick Danigelis is Professor and Chair of Sociology at UVM.  His past and current research has touched on a number of issues related to U.S. race relations, including the relevance of the intersection of race and class in analyzing African-American participation in the electoral process; race as context for understanding the role of productive activity among older Americans; the salience of different kinds of community interventions for improving breast cancer screening among older African-American women; and the relevance of aging for understanding changes in race attitudes over the past 50 years.  

Nick.Danigelis@uvm.edu

 

Research

Danigelis is currently working on an integration of his earlier work on African-American middle class attitudes and behaviors and his most recent work on the effects of aging on a variety of socio-political attitudes.  Using cumulative survey data from 1972 to the present, he is exploring the particular role that formal schooling plays in explaining changing attitudes on a variety of race- and non-race issues.  He is especially interested in how race operates as a context for understanding the effect of formal schooling on these attitudes.

William Darity, Jr.

Bio 

William A. ("Sandy") Darity, Jr. is Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy Studies and Professor of African and African American Studies and Economics at Duke University.  Previously he served as Director of: the Institute of African American Research, the Moor Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, the Undergraduate Honors Program in Economics, and Graduate Studies at the University of North Carolina.

 

Research

Darity's research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, doctrinal history and the social-psychological effects of unemployment exposure.  His most recent books are Economics, Economists, and Expectations:  Microfoundations to Macroapplications (2004) (co-authored with Warren Young and Robert Leeson), and a volume co-edited with Ashwini Deshpande titled Boundaries of Clan and Color:  Transnational Comparisons of Inter-Group Disparity (2003), both published by Routledge.  He has published or edited 10 books and more than 125 articles in professional journals.

 

Glen Elder

Bio

Glen Elder is currently the chair of the Department of Geography at UVM.  He is interested in the geography of sex, race and place. He teaches classes in African
regional geography, political geography, feminist geography and the geographies of sexualities. 

Glen.Elder@uvm.edu

Research

In his book, Hostels, Sex and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent Geographies (Ohio University Press, 2003), Elder argues that the impoverishing racialized system called apartheid in South Africa was premised on a spatialized form of heterosexuality. His attention to the ways in which sexuality is constructed through and across space has also been reflected in theoretical work, the field of animal geographies, and geography examining the lives of gay men and lesbians in the US and South Africa. He is currently working on a project related to the politics, culture, and racialized language of border making in contemporary global politics in northern Vermont and a project with Dr. Padraig Carmody (Trinity College, Dublin) examining the political economics of HIV/AIDS in southern Africa, paying particular attention to the history of extractive colonialism and gender inequalities.

 

Alec Ewald

Bio

Alec Ewald is Assistant Professor in Political Science at UVM.  His research focuses on voting rights - particularly criminal disenfranchisement law - and electoral institutions.  He is completing a book about the local dimension of American suffrage and also editing a book about international perspectives on felony disenfranchisement. 
Alec.Ewald@uvm.edu

 

Research

I'll begin this spring a new project on collateral consequences of criminal convictions.  "Collateral" consequences - loss of voting rights, access to certain professions, federal loans and housing, and so on - attach to a conviction, but are not formally part of a sentence, and are usually scattered around different parts of state law.  Our ongoing experiment in mass incarceration means these restrictions are having a great deal of impact.  I am still working out the precise contours of this project, particularly since merely compiling lists of existing collateral consequences can be difficult.  But I am interested in three main questions:  when and why such laws are enacted; how "visible" they are in the criminal-justice process; and their post-incarceration effects on individuals and communities. 

 

Laura Fishman

Bio

Laura T. Fishman, Associate Professor, at the University of Vermont, holds a M.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Sociology from McGill University.  After she completed her M.A., she worked as a researcher in several low-income areas of Chicago and New York City.  Her research activities have culminated in the acquisition of a streetwise familiarity with crime, drug distribution, prisons and the administration of justice.  She has published numerous articles in the field of criminology and a book, Women at the Wall: A Study of Prisoners' Wives Doing Time on the Outside (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).  

Laura.Fishman@uvm.edu

 

Research

Almost no work has explicitly addressed how African-American and Latino male offenders and their significant women (e.g., female partners, mothers, sisters or aunts) experience such multiple crises as the HIV/AIDS virus, imprisonment and re-entry.  My ethnographic study, Through the Wall of Silence: The Reactions of HIV/AIDS-Infected African-American and Latino Convicted Offenders and Their Significant Women to AIDS, Imprisonment and Re-entry, provides a multi-dimensional picture of the ways in which family-kin relationships and other interpersonal relationships are intertwined with alcohol and drug use, AIDS, imprisonment and re-entry.

 

John Gennari

Bio

John Gennari is Associate Professor of English and Director of  the ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies Program. His training is in American Studies with an emphasis on race, cultural production, and cultural  criticism.  

John.Gennari@uvm.edu

 

Research

My book "Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics" (2006) is a study of the role critics have played in generating ideas about jazz music, constructing the jazz canon, and shaping jazz's cultural politics. I'm at work on another jazz studies book tentatively titled "The Jazz Salon: Lenox, Music Inn, and the American 1950s," which centers on a cache of photographs taken at the Lenox School of Jazz. This is a cultural history that asks (among other questions): how do we see jazz? how do we see race? I've also been plugging away at a book called "Passing for Italian," a big chunk of which focuses on Italian raciality and on cultural representations of the relationship between Italians and blacks.

 

Brian Gilley

Bio

Brian Gilley is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont. He holds a Ph.D., M.A. and B.A. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oklahoma (2002). He is also a faculty member in the ALANA US Ethnic Studies Program at UVM. 

Brian.Gilley@uvm.edu

 

Research

My research focuses on the convergence of American Indian (AI) disease ideology and health disparities, particularly as they relate to HIV/AIDS. My current research examines the affects of structural inequality as it is incorporated into AI disease etiology and ideas about care.  I examine these issues by focusing on the ways in which health disparities are embodied in AI's assessment of their risk for HIV, their decisions about seeking treatment and testing, and AI community reactions toward individuals who are infected with HIV or have AIDS.  I argue that the socio-political conditions favoring the spread of HIV/AIDS among AIs was historically established and continues to influence Native disease theories.  In particular, I am examining the ways in which certain Native communities' ideas about care are challenged by HIV/AIDS.

 

Jinny Huh

Bio

Jinny Huh is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont.  Her research focuses on comparative race studies with an emphasis on Asian American and African American literature and culture, film and visual culture, and detective fiction. 

Jinny.Huh@uvm.edu

 

Research

With increasing rates of miscegenation and racially invisible bodies, how is race to be determined?  This study examines the dynamics and discourse of race detection through a comparative analysis of detective fiction and passing narratives, two genres that witnessed a simultaneous rise during the mid-nineteenth century.  I argue that the detective fiction genre in many ways prospers and responds to the anxiety of racial indecipherability by creating a systematic method of detection. By examining narratives of detection and passing written by both white and ethnic authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle and Earl Derr Biggers to Pauline Hopkins and Winnifred Eaton, among others, this study demonstrates that the politics and mechanics of race detection is highly specific to the eye of the gazer attuned to distinguishing the signs of race.  For example, while Dupin and Holmes may exhibit mystically and supernaturally intuitive powers, Pauline Hopkins shows that intuition and race detection is a necessary component of the African American community.  On the other hand, Winnifred Eaton responds to the obsession with detection by promoting a rhetoric of undetection in the emergence of Asian American fiction.  In addition to examining the politics of race detection in literature, this project also explores how numerous disciplines formulate their own concepts of racial knowledges via a discourse of detection (such as film studies, visual studies, law, ethnography, and literary history).  As such, through a comparative focus which encompasses multiple levels (19th/20th century, male/female, British/American, African American/Asian American), my study also addresses the potential threat and implications of racial erasure to Ethnic Studies specifically and Civil Rights overall.

 

Major Jackson

Bio

Major Jackson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont. His poetry has received wide acclaim. Two recent publications are Hoops ( 2006) and Leaving Saturn: Poems (2002). 

Major.Jackson@uvm.edu

 

Creative Work

Major Jackson has undertaken writing a series of linked, one-act verse plays that loosely string together the life of pre-Revolutionary poet Phillis Wheatley, who, as America's first African American poet to publish a volume of poetry, enjoyed a celebrated career as a symbol of the abolitionist movement, earned her physical freedom, yet died impoverished and neglected.  He has also begun a series of essays on race and poetry.

Nikki Khanna

Bio

Nikki Khanna is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont.  She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Emory University (2007), an M.A. from the University of Georgia, and a B.A. from Emory University.  Nikki Khanna's primary areas of specialization within Sociology include race/ethnic relations and social psychology, and her current research examines ethnic/racial identity among biracial and multiracial individuals. 

Nikki.Khanna@uvm.edu

Research

Her earlier work looked at the role of reflected appraisals (how  individuals think others see them) in shaping identity among multiracial Asian-white adults.  Her more recent work examines identity among black-white biracial adults living in the South, paying particular attention to how identity is formed and negotiated with  others in day-to-day social interactions.  Current manuscripts in  progress include "Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One  Drop Rule" and "I'm Like Them: The Role of Social Comparisons in Shaping Racial Identity." For a future project, she is interested in doing a comparative study examining colorism within the African American and Indian American community, looking at the ways in which different historical contexts (slavery vs. caste system) have shaped preference for light skin.

Dan Krymkowsi

Bio

A mathematical sociologist who received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in1986, I am an Associate Professor and have been at UVM since 1991. 

Daniel.Krymkowski@uvm.edu

Research
My research interests have always centered on the study of social stratification and mobility.  Currently, in collaboration with Professor Beth Mintz, I am looking at changes in occupational segregation by ethnicity, race, and sex over the course of the past few decades.

Dorian L. McCoy

Bio

Dorian McCoy is a George Washington Henderson Post-Doctoral Fellow in the College of Education and Social Services. His research focuses on the experiences of people of color in the academy. 

Dorian.McCoy@uvm.edu

 

Research

Defining the "Extreme" at a Predominantly White Institution: A Critical Race Perspective. This qualitative study explores the experiences of people of color employed at an “extreme” predominantly White institution (EPWI). In this study, I introduce the concept of an EPWI as a predominantly White institution (PWI) that is located in an area that is primarily majority culture without a substantial or recognizable community of color in close proximity. The communities where these institutions are located offer limited resources and/or services for people of color. This study advances the understanding of the experiences of faculty and administrators of color employed at these institutions. Grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT), counter-storytelling is employed to provide voice to their experiences. Significant in distinguishing the participants experiences from their colleagues employed at PWIs is their experience outside the institution.

Elaine McCrate

Bio

Elaine McCrate is a faculty member in the Economics Department and Women's and Gender Studies Program at UVM. Her work has addressed issues of concern to low-wage women, including welfare reform and teenage childbearing.  

Elaine.McCrate@uvm.edu

 

Research

My current work concerns gender and racial differences in the scheduling flexibility and predictability, as well as gender and racial differences in workplace autonomy and disciplinary systems. I have several papers in progress in the area of race, "unobservable"/"intangible" qualities of labor (such as honesty, work ethic, and "stick-with-it-ness"), and stereotypes. These include 1) a historical project on labor turnover in the late 19th/early 20th century in the foundry industry. At the time, one of the more persistent racial stereotypes of black workers was that of "floaters": workers who wouldn't stay with a job, who "floated" in and out of employment. I have been working with a long panel of payroll records for a southern iron foundry, that specify race, to analyze black and white turnover, 2) a paper attempting to bring together the theoretical and empirical literature on racial stereotypes concerning honesty and work ethic, and 3) a paper on the racial gap in discipline and punishment at work.

Ximena Mejia

Bio

Ximena Mejia is an Assistant Professor of Counselor Education and Counseling at the University of Vermont.  Her research areas focus on the application of feminist and liberation theories in psychotherapy interventions for counselor training, practice and supervision. 

Ximena.Mejia@uvm.edu

 

Research

"Gender Matters: Working with Men Survivors of Trauma" focuses on gender and the application of feminist psychotherapeutic interventions and theoretical tenets within a model that encompasses psychoeducational, experiential, and relational processes when counseling men survivors of trauma.  "An Investigation of The Impact of Sandplay Therapy on Mental Health Status and Resiliency Attitudes in Mexican Farmworker Women" studies how expressive arts counseling interventions anchored in feminist and liberation theories impacted counseling outcomes with this particular marginalized population.  "Queering Service-Learning in Counselor Training" presents a service-learning model anchored in liberation theory that provides counselors in training with pre-practicum opportunities for working with gay, lesbian, and bisexual populations.  Current areas of research interest include the application of feminist and liberation theories in counselor education pedagogy, expressive arts, and Latino gay, lesbian and bisexual identities

Beth Mintz

Bio

Beth Mintz is Professor of Sociology and Interim Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at the University of Vermont.   She is the author of The Power Structure of American Business (with M. Schwartz; University of Chicago Press, 1985), editor of Corporate Control, Capital Formation and Organizational Networks (with T. Takuyoshi and M. Schwartz, Chou University Press, 1996), and Lesbians in Academia (With E. Rothblum, Routledge, 1997). She has published articles on corporate structure and the corporate elite, business participation in health care reform, and capital formation within the health care system.  She and her colleague, Dan Krymkowski, are finishing a project on gender and race/ethnicity in labor markets and they are beginning a study of the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender in educational attainment.  

Beth.Mintz@uvm.edu

 

Research

"Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Differences in Educational Attainment, Early Career Patterns, and Social Mobility: Trends in the United States." Many changes in gender, race, and ethnic stratification have been documented in the post-war United States (see, e.g., Featherman and Hauser 1978: Chapters 6 and 8, Hout 1984, DiPrete and Grusky 1990). This paper examines recent trends in such stratification by comparing twenty-five year-olds from the National Longitudinal Study of the Class of 1972 to twenty-six year-olds from the National Education Longitudinal Study (who made it to their senior year in high school).  Data on these groups of individuals were collected in 1979 and 2000, respectively, thus providing an opportunity to analyze trends over about two decades.  We examine gender and racial/ethnic (Hispanics, non-Hispanic African-Americans, and non-Hispanic whites) differences in educational attainment, labor force status, the association between education and occupation, and intergenerational social mobility.  Findings from log-linear models indicate significant interactions between sex and race/ethnicity, demonstrating the importance of analyzing these factors simultaneously.  In addition, there were changes over time in the associations between: (1) sex and labor force status; (2) race/ethnicity and labor force status; (3) sex and educational attainment; (4) race/ethnicity and educational attainment; (5) sex and occupational attainment; (6) race/ethnicity and occupational attainment; (7) educational and occupational attainment; (8) social background and social destination.  More concretely, associations (1), (5), (6), (7), and (8) all declined, while the others changed in more complex ways (but did not increase).

 

Caitlin Myers

Bio

Caitlin Knowles Myers is Assistant Professor of Economics at Middlebury College and a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany.  Her research focuses on measuring discrimination and inequality in labor and housing markets. 

cmyers@middlebury.edu

Research
An oft-made argument in the affirmative action debate is that such programs need not be permanent because the forced exposure to diversity in the workplace will result in the erosion of prejudice and discrimination.  In a recent paper ("A Cure for Discrimination?  Affirmative Action and the Case of California Proposition 209") Professor Myers finds that the removal of affirmative action programs that had been in place for nearly forty years resulted in a fall in the labor force participation of minorities in California.  This finding fails to confirm the hypothesis that diversity in the workplace might serve to combat inequality.  A new project inspired in part by her research on affirmative action will examine the effects of diversity on college campuses.  One of the things that makes it difficult to evaluate this issue is that students usually aren't exposed forcibly to people from different backgrounds - they have autonomy in picking friends, classes, social groups and so on.  As a result, it's not surprising that students who self-select into a more diverse group of friends tend to have more open attitudes towards others from different backgrounds. This new project will use the characteristics of a student's freshman roommate as a (mostly) random "shock" to the diversity in a student's life. It will examine how the characteristics of a student's roommate correlate with the student's own changing self-reported attitudes as well as with more objective outcomes such as whether the student was more likely to request a different roommate the following year.

 

Hilary Neroni

Bio

Hilary Neroni is an Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont.  Her research focuses on issues of gender and race through film theory and psychoanalysis. 
Hilary.Neroni@uvm.edu

 

Research

In her first book The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema, she considered the cultural impact and theoretical implications involving the image of the violent women in cinema. In her current work, she is investigating a feminist film theory that might push beyond the deadlocks of earlier feminism (especially the question of diverse female voices) through theorizing a more complex approach to representation.

Sarah Nilsen

Bio

Sarah is an Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies.  Her areas of Interest include cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, Walt Disney in the 1950's, and race in film and television.  She teaches classes in the history of film and television, and critical race theories in the media. 

Sarah.Nilsen@uvm.edu

 

Research

Projecting America examines the use of film as part of American cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.  By focusing on the Brussels World's Fair of 1958, the first global cultural event of the Cold War, the book illustrates the key ways in which film was a crucial tool in America's battle against communism.  The fair provides a snapshot image of Eisenhower's psychological warfare in action.  Framed within the goals of the USIA, it presents an exceptionally contained example of America's program of propaganda directed towards its European allies who were considered a key target for their information programs.  Recently completed a chapter on the figure of the magical negro in the films of Stephen King and am working on an edited collection of essays on the videos of Michael Jackson.

 

Jane E. Atieno Okech

Bio

Jane Okech is an Assistant Professor of Counselor Education and Counseling at the University of Vermont. Her research focus is on the provision of multiculturally competent group psychotherapy training, practice, and supervision of group leaders. 

Jane.Okech@uvm.edu

 

Research

"An exploratory study of the experiences of expert group psychotherapy clinical supervisors." Literature in the field of group psychotherapy indicates that clinical supervision may play a role in developing supervisee diversity-competent group leadership skills. To provide competent supervision, supervisors should be able to manage the complexity of supervising group workers, as well as possess the knowledge and skills to provide diversity sensitive intervention, conceptualization, and personalization at each level of group interaction. Research regarding group work supervision has however focused mostly on the experiences of supervisees. While this type of research is useful for informing the group work supervision process, description of supervisors' experiences while conducting group work supervision would provide essential information regarding their feelings, thought processes, and actions that could confirm and add to existing practices and models of group work supervision. Thus, the purpose of this study was to provide a systematic exploration of the experiences of group work supervisors during the supervision process. The grand research question addressed in this study was, "What do supervisors experience during the process of supervising group workers?"

Stephanie Seguino

Bio

Stephanie Seguino is Professor of Economics at the University of Vermont and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests focus on economic inequality by gender and race and their impact on macroeconomic outcomes. This work also considers the effect of macroeconomic policies on racial and gender groups, underscoring the role of stratification in determining the distribution of the positive and negative effects of policies and economic growth. 

Stephanie.Seguino@uvm.edu

 

Research

My current project explores the impact of disinflationary monetary policy by gender and race. "Tight money" policies raise interest rates and reduce access to credit, leading to economic contraction. The work I am currently engaging in hypothesizes the women and people of color are more likely to get the "bad news" of disinflationary policy in the form of larger increases in unemployment than white males. I also explore whether in ethnically heterogeneous societies, people of color are more likely than women from the dominant group to suffer negative economic consequences of disinflationary policies.

 

Rhonda Sharpe

Bio

Bio Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Vermont.   Her primary research concentrates on the social inequality resulting from access to education, with an emphasis on postsecondary education policies. 

Rhonda.Sharpe@uvm.edu

 

Research

"Obstacles to Faculty Diversity: Implication for Affirmative Action," focuses on ways to change the demography of academe. This project seeks to identify the points of attrition for tenure track faculty, the supply of doctorates by race and gender for social science and humanities disciplines, and to identify informal relationships between bachelor degree programs and doctoral programs.  The next phase of this project will focus specifically on the impact of Grutter v. Boilinger on faculty recruitment and undergraduate and graduate training programs.  Her secondary research focuses on both the economics of sports and the economics of gender.  Specifically, her interests are 1) inter-racial and intra-racial female inequality of socio-economic factors; 2) the disparities between historically black and traditionally white land grant universities; 3) the relationship between education, income and wealth; and 4) the performance of athletes in college and the labor market.  She serves as the Associate Editor for the Review of Black Political Economy.

Amani Whitfield

Bio

Harvey Amani Whitfield was raised in Washington D.C.  He attended Colorado State University and graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.  He received his doctorate from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2003.  He has taught at UVM since fall 2004.

Harvey.Whitfield@uvm.edu

 

Research

Harvey Amani Whitfield is interested in black migration to Maritime Canada during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  His first book examines the formation of community among black migrants from the Lowcountry and the Chesapeake in Nova Scotia after the war of 1812.  He is currently working on a book about slavery in Maritime Canada after the Revolutionary War.  Whitfield's major focus is the history of black people in Canada.

 

Phani Wunnava

Bio

Phanindra V. Wunnava is the David K. Smith Professor of Applied Economics at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, and a Research Fellow at IZA (Institute for the Study of Labor), Bonn, Germany.  He joined the Middlebury Economics department in 1985.  He has also served as chair of the department.  He was a Research Associate in economics at the State University of New York - Binghamton, during the academic years 1989-1992.  During the academic year 1999-2000 he was a Visiting Scholar/Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.  He was trained under a noted labor economist, Solomon Polachek of State University of New York- Binghamton, and received a Ph.D. in economics in 1986.  His fields of interest are applied econometrics and labor economics. 

wunnava@middlebury.edu

 

Research

Phani Wunnava's articles have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals covering the areas of life-cycle union and non-union wage/benefit differentials, firm size effects, gender and racial wage differentials, efficiency wage models, charitable contributions towards higher education, disincentive effects of unemployment insurance, infant mortality, effect of net foreign investments on manufacturing productivity, time-series properties of the north American unemployment rates and Asian stock markets, the effect of political regimes on economic growth, fertility determinants, and determinants of internet diffusion.  He routinely serves as a referee for a number of scholarly journals.  He also co-edited New Approaches to Economic and Social Analyses of Discrimination (with Richard R. Cornwall), Praeger 1991; Immigrants and Immigration Policy:  Individual Skills, Family Ties, and Group Identities (with Harriet Duleep), JAI Press, 1996; and Changing Role of Unions:  New Forms of Representation, M. E. Sharpe, 2004, which has been recognized by the industrial Relations Section of Princeton University as one of the twelve Noteworthy Books in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics for 2004.

Hyon-Joo Yoo-Murphree

Bio

Hyon-Joo Yoo-Murphree is an Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont. Her research focuses on East Asian cinema and postcolonial studies as well as globalization and media.

Hyon-Joo.Murphree@uvm.edu

 

Research

In her published work, she interrogates the formation of subalternity in a postcolonial world. In her essay "The Stranger's Passage in Cyberspace" (Postcolonial Studies Vol. 8, No. II, 2005), she argues that global capital functions as a new form of sovereign power and its control over the right to information creates the subaltern body to be allowed to die. In "Class and Ethnicity in the Global Market for Organs: The Case of Korean Cinema" (with Rebecca Garden, Journal of Medical Humanities Vol. 28 No. 4, 2007), she looks at how the medical-industry complex depends on the scarcity of organs to maintain the commodity status of human organs and the capitalist logic of life. In "Transnational Cultural Production and the Politics of Moribund Masculinity" (forthcoming in positions: east asia cultures critique Vol. 16, No. 3, 2008), she theorizes postcolonial subjectivity as the point of cultural resistance that radically negates economic and ideological demands made on the subject by global capitalism and the nation-state. She is also working on a book-length project theorizing postcolonial East Asian cinema and society.