Steering Committee
Amy Armenia is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Randolph-Macon College. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2006. Her dissertation research examined union and professionalization campaigns for family day care workers. She is currently using the NICHD Study of Early Child Care to explore the effect of child care choices and experiences on women's labor force participation and the likelihood and consequences of racial-ethnic match between children and child care providers.
Medora W. Barnes is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at John Carroll University (Cleveland, OH), where she focuses on the intersections of family, gender, and work. She received her PhD in Sociology and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Connecticut. She is broadly concerned with issues of gender equality and implementing public policies that allow for a successful work-family integration and meet the needs of all family members. Her past research has examined motherhood and fatherhood, the transition to parenthood, marriage, and the division of domestic labor. Her current work explores the contexts in which young dual-earner couples negotiate an equal division of housework and carework. This research focuses on how couples utilize parental strategies that are in line with their beliefs about gender and parenting, their previous behavioral patterns as a couple, and the existing barriers and opportunities created by their employers and existing childcare options.
Elana Buch, M.S.W. is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Program in Social Work and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation research uses ethnographic methods to compare how home care participants' diverse cultural and economic backgrounds influence publicly funded and individually funded home care for older adults. Elana's work has received funding from the National Institutes on Aging and the Hartford Foundation. Her research and teaching interests include home and community based long term care, low wage work (specifically care work), kinship, qualitative methods and comparative/global aging.
Jennifer Craft Morgan is Associate Director for Research at the UNC Institute on Aging, based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently co-principal investigator, with Thomas R. Konrad, PhD for the Evaluation of the Jobs to Careers: Promoting Work-Based Learning for Quality Care Program. Jobs to Careers is a national initiative of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in collaboration with the Hitachi Foundation. Jobs to Careers seeks to establish systems that train, develop, reward, and advance current frontline health and health care workers to improve the quality of care and ensure the quality of services provided to patients and communities. She previously served as a co-investigator on the now-complete Better Jobs, Better Care Applied Research project (STEP UP NOW) and currently serves as a the Associate Director for the on-going intervention program WIN A STEP UP (Workforce Improvement for Nursing Assistants: Supporting Training, Education and Payment for Upgrading Performance). Dr. Morgan is also involved in other workforce and evaluation studies in the Institute including the Workforce Aging in the New Economy (WANE) project, the Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science (WILIS) project and the Lifelong Access Libraries Evaluation Project. She received her Ph.D. (Just a Job? A Mixed Methods Analysis of the Situation of Direct Care Workers in Long Term Care) in the Summer of 2005 from the Department of Sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill where she also received her M.A. Dr. Morgan's substantive interests include medical sociology, gender stratification, evaluation research, health care workforce, and the sociological study of work and careers over the life course.
Constance M. Dallas is an Associate Professor of Nursing at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Illinois. The purpose of her program of research is to develop a theory of paternal involvement for low-income African American fathers from the multiple perspectives of the fathers and the major persons who shape their paternal role, such as their own parents, the mothers of their children and peers. Her work has a strong interdisciplinary focus and she has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to study the evolution of the paternal role for unmarried, low-income, African American adolescent fathers by in-depth qualitative interviews of 25 adolescent father kinship systems (adolescent father, paternal grandparents, adolescent mother and maternal grandparents) from pregnancy until their babies were 24 months of age. Study findings indicate that, unlike adult non-residential fathers, the support that unmarried, low-income African American adolescent fathers receive from their families of origin may be just as important as the quality of their relationships with the mothers of their children in determining their ongoing involvement with their children. At present, Dr. Dallas' research focuses on factors that influence paternal involvement of low-income African American fathers who father children with two or more partners from the multiple perspectives of those persons who shape their fatherhood role. Preliminary findings suggest that these fathers must negotiate a series of complex and sometimes volatile relationships with their own families and romantic partners and the families and romantic partners of the mothers of their children in order to maintain ongoing involvement with their children. Her work has been presented both nationally and internationally and her articles have appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed, health-related journals, such as the Annual Review of Nursing Research and a chapter in the recently released Social Work with African American Males, from Oxford Publications.
Anna Guevarra is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and a Visiting Researcher at De La Salle University's Social Development Research Center in the Philippines from 2001-02 and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment (ILE) in UCLA from 2003-04. Her research interests include immigrant labor, migrant careworkers, and globalization. Her forthcoming book, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The transnational labor brokering of Filipino workers (Rutgers University Press), is an ethnographic exploration of Philippines' labor export industry, focusing on the racial, gender, class, and cultural dynamics of the transnational production and management of Filipinos for varied global economies. A component of this book comes from a recently-completed project, which examines the labor migration and immigrant identity-formation of Filipino nurses recruited to work in Texas and Arizona. Among her current research projects include examining the continued demand for "upgraded" careworkers (e.g., highly educated/skilled domestic workers) and 2) exploring the relationship between carework and masculinity, specifically looking into the role of men as careworkers situated in traditionally-construed feminized occupations like nursing and domestic labor.
Deborah Little is an assistant professor of sociology at Adelphi University, where she teaches courses in gender and carework, disability studies, research methods, and sociology of law. She formerly worked as an attorney, assisting clients with domestic violence, welfare, and disability cases in legal aid and private practice. She has published in the area of care and welfare reform. Her current research interests include the construction of disability identity, the intersections of disability, race, and class, and the relationship between care theory and disability theory. She has been a member of the Care Network for many years.
LaShawnDa Pittman-Gay is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at Northwestern University and a dissertation fellow at Hiram College. In September 2010, she will be a postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar in the Research & Training Program at the National Poverty Center (NPC), Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. During her tenure at the NPC and as an NSF postdoctoral fellow (January 2011), she plans to complete a book, publish several scholarly articles, and conduct additional research related to her dissertation “Standing in the Gap: African American Caretaking Grandmothers.” In her dissertation, she uses in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate custodial grandmothers’ caretaking experiences from their own perspectives. She received her M.A. in Sociology from the University of Connecticut and her B.S. in Urban Policy from Georgia State University. Her areas of interest include social inequality; urban poverty; race, class, and gender; and carework.
Leonila Vega is the Executive Director of the Direct Care Alliance. The Direct Care Alliance is a national advocacy organization focused on improving quality care for elders, people with disabilities and others by (1) building a state-based alliance of direct-care workers, employers, consumers and concerned citizens and (2) giving workers a direct voice in improving the quality of direct-care jobs. First initiated as a project of PHI—a national organization that promotes quality care through quality jobs within the long-term care system—the Direct Care Alliance was then launched as an independent 501(c) (3) in 2006. The DCA works at the intersection of three key policy issues: a) quality long-term care for consumers; b) workforce development for low-income workers; and c).economic and social justice for women. The DCA builds on this base by adding the vital missing piece for sustainable change by directly engaging key stakeholders—workers, consumers and employers—in grassroots advocacy initiatives. The DCA and PHI remain in close alliance, with the DCA building constituency-based power, and PHI providing practice and policy expertise. The DCA pursues a two-pronged strategy for constituency-based change Prior to her work with DCA, Leonila practiced law as a disability and elder rights lawyer and worked with SEIU Local 150 as its Home Care and Political Director.
Judith Wittner is a Professor of Sociology at Loyola University, Chicago and an ethnographer specializing in gender studies. She received her undergraduate degree from Brandeis University. She studied in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University for two years, but left after the birth of her first child. Drawn back to school by the student movements of the 60s, she enrolled in Roosevelt University where she received a Master's degree in Political Science in 1971 and taught some of the first women's studies courses offered in Chicago. In 1973 she entered the Ph.D. program in sociology at Northwestern University and received her Ph.D. in 1977. She helped to establish the Women's Studies Program at Loyola in 1979, the first such program at a Jesuit University, and directed the program for five years. Judith teaches courses in qualitative methods, families, gender, social theory and popular culture at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. She has also worked with numerous community groups and agencies, including the Center for Impact Research, Women Employed, the Center for Cultural Understanding at the Field Museum, Hull House Feminist Advocates, Girls' Best Friend Foundation, the West Humboldt Park Family and Community Development Council, the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (UCSF), Women United for a Better Chicago, United Way of Chicago and the Illinois Council on Teenage Pregnancy. She has taught ethnography and gender workshops in Ile Ife, Nigeria, San Salvador, El Salvador, Kaunas, Lithuania, as well as in Chicago. Judith studies institutions "from the bottom up." Her dissertation explored the foster care system from the standpoint of foster children. In the 80s she collected work-life histories of women who were employed in a small toy factory in Chicago from the 1950s to 1984, when the plant closed. She studied Chicago's specialized Domestic Violence Court by accompanying women and men complainants from the time they initiated charges to the final disposition of their cases. With sociologist of religion R. Steven Warner, she edited a volume of ethnographies about ethnically diverse immigrant congregations in the US, including Chinese Christians in Washington, D.C., Evangelical Koreans in suburban Boston, Maya Catholics and Mexican gang youth in Los Angeles, North African Muslims in New York, as well as Rastafarians, Hindus, Iranian Jews, and Haitians.
