Lora Bex Lempert

Racial and Spatial Relations as Fundamental Determinants of Health in Detroit

African Americans in the United States have a higher than average risk of morbidity and mortality, despite declining mortality rates for many causes of death for the general population. This article examines race-based residential segregation as a fundamental cause of racial disparities, shaping differences in exposure to, and experiences of, diseases and risk factors. The spatial distribution of racial groups, specifically the residential segregation of African Americans in aging urban areas, contributes to disparities in health by influencing access to economic, social, and physical resources essential to health. Using the Detroit metropolitan area as a case study, this article looks at the influences of the distribution of African American and white residents on access to these resources and discusses the implications for urban policies to reduce racial disparities in health status.

Women's strategies for survival: Developing agency in abusive relationships

The simultaneity of love and violence in the lived experiences of abused women forms the context within which these women construct meaning and develop agency. Utilizing grounded theory methodology (Glaser, 1978; Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss, 1987; Strauss and Corbin, 1990), this paper explicates these agentic processes by analyzing the strategies employed by 32 abused women, publically and privately, to mitigate the violence and its effects. By highlighting the contradictory duality in these relationships, the processes by which abused women strategize and develop agency to halt, change, and/or cope with the violence becomes analytically salient.

A NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF ABUSE Connecting the Personal, the Rhetorical, and the Structural

Narrating experiences of intimate, interpersonal violence is a means by which abused women make the violence coherent to self and to others. Narratives demonstrate that abusive relationships have courses, that womens actions within these relationships are rational and reasonable, and, further, that these actions can be made understandable to others. By using the theoretical literature on narrative structure, this analysis of one womans (“Jane” s) story of intimate, interpersonal violence elucidates a system of social meanings that can facilitate the processes by which other abused women, and their supporters, can make existential sense of violence from an intimate partner. This article is a detailed analysis of one womans violent relationship. Janes is a story of abuse, not the story of abuse.

Being Part of The World Detroit Women’s Perceptions of Health and the Social Environment

We examine African American women’s perceptions of the ways their neighborhoods affect health. Drawing upon data from participant observation and focus groups with Detroit residents, we examine physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social dimensions encompassed in women’s definitions of health. The complexity of relationships between health and neighborhood emerge as women describe not only the influence of neighborhood conditions on health, but also on social relationships that have been established as protective of health. As women describe the effects of neighborhood conditions, they describe their active efforts and strategies to maintain personal and community health. We discuss implications of these results for understanding multiple, complex associations between social inequalities, neighborhood characteristics, and health. We suggest that the exploratory evidence presented here supports frameworks that posit the role of race-based residential segregation in racial disparities in health through limiting access to social and economic resources that are necessary to sustain health.

Growing Pains Developing Collective Efficacy in the Detroit Theory Group

We describe the process of developing a “Think Tank,” or discussion and outreach group for individuals who successfully completed the inside–out Prison Exchange classes offered at a Level 2 correctional facility in Detroit, Michigan in 2008. We employ the concept of “collective efficacy” and members’ own accounts of their experiences to describe the Theory Group’s evolution: (a) formation and initial growth, (b) public outreach, and (c) workshops, trainings, and future activities. We document the complicated dynamics of working with prison officials and make suggestions for those seeking to continue the inside–out dynamic beyond the classroom.

“What Is It that these People Want? Are We Part of Some Kind of Experiment?” Mentoring in a Women’s Prison

Utilizing a “layered” account that overlies personal experience with feminist, sociological, and pedagogical theory, this article explores the material reality of student mentors assisting in college-level courses offered in a prison site to incarcerated women. The authors present analyses of their developing understandings of theory-in-action as they engaged in symbolic interactions within the carceral environment. The authors offer reflective representations of their experiences mentoring incarcerated women and they explicate a variety of epistemological positions. The article draws attention to structural boundaries and barriers, both physical and emotional; to the construction and maintenance of “safe” classroom space; and to mirror reflections, that is, to seeing self in the “other.”

Shelters: for abused women, or abusive men? As aids to survival, or as rehabilitation sites?

Shelters for abused women are short-term safety nets and not long-term solutions to the intractable problem of male violence against women, writes LORA BEX LEMPERT

Book Review: Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters, Convicted Survivors: The Imprisonment of Battered Women Who Kill

Reading these texts in the wake of the red state/blue state election of 2004, I am struck by Lamb’s observation that the United States is a paradoxical nation, both charitable and unforgiving. In the narratives of the women in these texts, housed and controlled within an engorged prison system, there is little evidence of charity and even less of forgiveness. Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and Convicted Survivors focus our attention on 52 of the women in these prisons, locked away in cement block warehouses and, for the most part, invisible and forgotten. Although they represent less than 1 percent of female prisoners currently under the control of the U.S. prison industrial complex, the women in these texts nonetheless help us to identify and understand patterns and processes preincarceration and postincarceration that lead to women’s vulnerability in a presumably gender-blind criminal justice system. As Lamb notes, “There are misconceptions to be abandoned, biases to be dropped” (p. 17) when imprisoned women are the discursive topic. Couldn’t Keep It to Myself is an anthology of the writings of 10 women inmates and an employed instructor at York Correctional Facility in Niantic, Connecticut. It is the end product of years of writing workshops at the prison led by Wally Lamb. Lamb is a New York Times best-selling fictional author and an Oprah book choice favorite as well as the volunteer facilitator of the writing workshops for prison inmates. The women’s stories—of poverty, drug abuse, incest, teen pregnancy, violence, parental neglect and rejection, and self-destructive choices—are delivered in their own voices. Lamb has chosen for inclusion life stories of “rhythm and blues,” of racism and sexism, of women’s first victimizations, of the lessons in anticipatory socialization taught by family, friends, community, and system to feelings of worthlessness and codes of silence. “To imprison a woman is to remove her voice from the world, but many female inmates have been silenced by life long before the transport van carries them from the courthouse to the correctional facility” (p. 9). Without intention, these stories reflect burgeoning sociological imaginations. The narratives detail women’s enlightened discoveries of the convergences of private troubles and public issues articulated by C. Wright Mills. These women own their bad choices, but they also exhibit understandings of the contexts within which those bad choices were made— contexts characterized by racism, poverty, sexism, and the resultant truncated opportunity structures. Brenda Medina (“Hell, and How I Got Here”), for example, convicted of homicide in a gang-related killing and sentenced, at 17 years old, to 25 years without parole, shares much of her life story in just 34 pages of prose. She takes us from a home with eight brothers and