I currently serve as Professor of Sociology/Anthropologyand Women’s Studiesat Denison University.

My previous employment as a community organizer, a public policy analyst, and a Budget Assistant to the Governor (for Children and Family Services) inform both my teaching and my research interests.

My recent research focuses on the racialized politics and economics of women's care work, as well as political activism among child care providers.  In“The Right And Responsibility To Care: Oppositional Consciousness Among Family Child Care Providers Of Color” (in The Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, 2008) I explore child care providers of color use of oppositional consciousness to claim the right to increased social recognition and economic reward in their employment. In We Are Not Babysitters: Family Child Care Providers Redefine Work and Care (Rutgers University Press, 2003), I analyze how and why women enter paid child care work.  The story is told through the experiences of twenty family child care providers of diverse racial and ethnic identity, immigrant status, and social class. Through their words we explore the changing meanings of community, family, work, and care – and we are called to rethink the social and economic value of paid child care providers and their work.

My current research incorporates community-based, action research models. "Speaking and Organizing Across Difference: Multi-Racial Coalitions and the Grassroots Mobilization of Child Care Workers" (forthcoming in Feminist Formations) explores the effectiveness and challenges of multi-racial, grassroots coalitions as tools for mobilizing child care workers. A second project "From Theory to Practice: Health Care Access and Empowerment in a Low Income Community" (a journal length manuscript in progress) explores the challenges of promoting community empowerment practices in addressing barriers to health care.

Just as I am committed to community-based, collaborative research, I believe the most effective teaching and learning processes must be interactive. To this end I employ a variety of approaches to teaching/learning in the classes I teach including critical and analytic service learning, and teaching in learning communities. Using these and other approaches to teaching/learning, I seek to enable students to engage in the work of active, informed citizenship – the work which I believe to be the primary goal of a liberal arts education.