We are excited to announce three new Associate Faculty members in Women and Gender Studies: Amanda Stevenson, Kaifa Roland, and Joëlle Cruz. Our Associate Faculty work in conjunction with the core faculty to promote a strong and interdisciplinary community of scholars. They meet regularly to discuss departmental issues, serve on committees, and participate in events, and their research interests touch on a wide range of issues pertaining to the study of women, gender, and sexuality studies.
Dr. Amanda Stevenson, an assistant professor in Sociology, studies the impacts of and responses to abortion and family planning policy. She is currently engaged in two constellations of projects about reproductive health policy, one in Texas and another in Colorado. Her work in Texas includes an administrative data and interview study of the experiences of minors who have sought judicial bypasses of parental consent to access abortion. In Colorado, she has just begun a large mixed-methods study of the life course impacts of access to contraception. She also has an ongoing study focused on the social movement framing of opposition to abortion restrictions, using data from many sources, including Twitter, websites, and interviews.
A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Stevenson uses both demographic methods to study the impacts of reproductive health policies, and computational methods to study social responses to these policies. “Here at CU, I would recommend the courses in Information Science, particularly their graduate methods sequence, which is one of the best around,” notes Stevenson. She credits a course she took in the semantics of programming languages for preparing her to understand computation regardless of the platform or language.
Stevenson also regularly testifies before legislative bodies and committees regarding the demographic impacts of proposed or enacted reproductive health legislation. “I started testifying my first year of graduate school, just based on others’ research, but I quickly started doing my own work specific to Texas and would testify on that,” she relates. “One of the things I realized while talking with legislators is that they cared deeply about their districts, so I developed an app to display my estimates of the impact of defunding family planning for each individual district in Texas.” Stevenson has also drafted expert declarations and briefs for legal challenges to restrictive reproductive health laws and was an expert witness in the challenge to Texas’ restriction of Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program.
Dr. Joëlle Cruz is an associate professor in the Department of Communications who specializes in organizational communication and is particularly interested in interpretive modes of inquiry including ethnography and autoethnography. She notes that her scholarship has been shaped by her multicultural background, having lived and studied in Côte d'Ivoire, Zimbabwe, the Netherlands, France and the United States. Her research is varied, including studies of how organizations affect the agency of those they attempt to serve, and the efficacy of communication and organizational strategies women are using to achieve social change in developing nations. This semester, Cruz is teaching courses in both organizational communication and qualitative communication research methods.
Cruz has also recently published an autoethnographic piece, "Brown Body of Knowledge: A Tale of Erasure" in the journal Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies (2017), consisting of five short poems which document her own experience of discursive closure in academia through the intersection of her own identities. Cruz notes that "beyond my immediate story, poetic prose helps to document experiences of silencing and annihilation, which are particularly difficult to put into words." This powerfully moving piece highlights the complexities of institutional silencing faced by many foreign-born faculty.
Cruz is also the author of multiple journal articles and book chapters, including a co-authored chapter titled "Releasing/Translating Agency: A Postcolonial Disruption of the Master’s Voice among Liberian Market Women" in the recently released book The Agency of Organizing: Perspectives and Case Studies (Routledge, 2017). She has also recently published the research article "Invisibility and Visibility in Alternative Organizing: A Communicative and Cultural Model" in Management Communication Quarterly (2017), the culmination of 40 interviews and 100 hours of participant observation with market women's susu groups in Monrovia, Liberia. "Departing from Western-centered approaches," Cruz writes, "I deployed African feminisms to examine how organizational members communicatively negotiate invisibility and visibility in a different cultural logic and context".
Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha:
An Ethnography of Racial Meanings
L. Kaifa Roland
"Through vivid vignettes and firsthand details, Roland exposes the lasting effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of state-sponsored segregated tourism in Cuba."
Dr. Kaifa Roland is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. As a cultural anthropologist, Roland is particularly interested in the study of tourism, national identity, racial and gender constructions, popular cultural practices and critiques of capitalism. She has conducted extensive field research in Cuba and is the author of Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha (Oxford University Press 2011), which describes the shifting intersections of race, class, sexuality, and belonging.
Roland has recently published the article "How bodies matter: Yesterday's America today" in the HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2017). This article responds to a statement in the essay, "The Hands of Donald Trump" (Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram 2016), which had a visceral effect on Roland when she read it: "Trump's body matters." "Upon reading those words, my skin crawled and my stomach churned, but the impulses of my black female body did not matter," writes Roland. She further argues that questions of racialization and belonging are central to defining how bodies matter.
This semester, Roland is currently teaching two anthropology courses: The Caribbean in Post-Colonial Perspective and Explorations in Anthropology: Brown Studies. She recently participated as a panelist at the Borders Conference, held in September at CU Boulder, discussing the topic "Navigating Racialized Space: Notes on Bodies and Borders." Her current research includes a submission "Black Hair Do’s: Televisual and Autoethnographic Reflections" to a special themed issue of the Journal of American Culture which will explore visions of Black womanhood in American culture.