My ‘former lives’ 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 We Are Not Babysitters: Family Child Care Providers Redefine Work and Care (Rutgers University Press, 2003) I explore the paid child care work of twenty child care providers of diverse racial and ethnic identities and social classes. These women’s work lives require us to rethink the often invisible and undervalued work of child care. In “The Right And Responsibility To Care: Oppositional Consciousness Among Family Child Care Providers Of Color” (The Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, 2007) 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.
My current research incorporates community-based, action research models. Through participatory action research, one project explores multi-racial alliances as a tool for organizing child care workers. A second auto-ethnographic project analyzes my attempts to bridge academic and activist communities through participatory action research.
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 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.
Mary Tuominen
Department of Sociology/Anthropology
Denison University
Granville, Ohio 43023
phone: 740-587-6646
fax: 740-587-5676
