Research

My dissertation investigates Black maternal health disparities by exploring patient-provider interactions for the ways that race and racism permeate interactions and affect emotions, meaning-making and experience. This project is supported by the NSF-funded American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

In addition, in an article currently under review, I argue that within white institutional spaces, cultural landscapes center the white experience and ostracize people of color who cannot meet the expectations of whiteness. Building on previous research, I ask how institutions that have multiple and conflicting cultural expectations shape the emotional experiences of people of color, adopting an intersectional perspective, ask how these experiences vary across class. I use the case of Black women’s experiences with reproductive healthcare to examine how Black women as the racialized ‘Other’ manage competing cultural expectations in a white institutional landscape, with particular attention to the emotional dimension. I find that “affective burdens”, or racialized emotion directives, act as a mechanism to shape the emotional comportment of Black women in white space. Moreover, how women respond to affective burdens is shaped by class, leading to different classed experiences of reproductive healthcare. 

Another stream of research the relationship between race and family planning . In an article published in Qualitative Health Journal, my co-authors and I suggest that understanding Black women’s lived-experiences with becoming a mother can improve outcomes in family planning. We explore Black women’s pathways to motherhood and broaden current conceptualizations of family formation. Our findings challenge deficit-based narratives surrounding Black motherhood and demonstrate how health practitioners can facilitate humanizing conversations that prioritize Black women’s lived experiences regarding family planning.