Lynn Weber

A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality:

Since the mid-1980s, scholarship and college courses that address multiple dimensions of inequality under the rubric of race, class, gender, and (recently) sexuality studies have grown rapidly. Most courses now employ a set of readings, many of which are drawn from a growing number of anthologies. A strength of this approach is its presentation of the diversity of human experiences and the multiplicity of critical perspectives. A weakness is its failure to convey the commonalities in race, class, gender, and sexuality analyses of social reality. To aid in teaching and research on race, class, gender, and sexuality, this article presents six common themes that characterize this scholarship. Race, class, gender, and sexuality are historically and globally specific, socially constructed power relations that simultaneously operate at both the macro (societal) and micro (individual) levels of society. Scholarship in this tradition emphasizes the interdependence of knowledge and activism.

INTERSECTIONALITY AND WOMEN'S HEALTH: CHARTING A PATH TO ELIMINATING HEALTH DISPARITIES

Scholars and activists working both within and outside the massive health-related machinery of government and the private sector and within and outside communities of color address the same fundamental questions: Why do health disparities exist? Why have they persisted over such a long time? What can be done to significantly reduce or eliminate them?

Mississippi front-line recovery work after Hurricane Katrina: An analysis of the intersections of gender, race, and class in advocacy, power relations, and health

By disrupting the routine practices and social structures that support social hierarchy, disasters provide a unique opportunity to observe how gender, race, and class power relations are enacted and reconstituted to shape health inequities. Using a feminist intersectional framework, we examine the dynamic relationships among a government/corporate alliance, front-line disaster recovery workers, and disadvantaged residents in Mississippi Gulf Coast communities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which struck in August, 2005. Data were collected between January 2007 and October 2008 through field observations, public document analysis, and in-depth interviews with 32 front-line workers representing 27 non-governmental, nonprofit community-based organizations. Our analysis reveals how power relationships among these groups operated at the macro-level of the political economy as well as in individual lives, increasing health risks among both the disadvantaged and the front-line workers serving and advocating on their behalf. Socially situated as outsiders-within, front-line recovery workers operated in the middle ground between the disadvantaged populations they served and the powerful alliance that controlled access to essential resources. From this location, they both observed and were subject to the processes guiding the allocation of resources and their unequal outcomes. Following a brief period of hope for progressive change, recovery workers became increasingly stressed and fatigued, particularly from lack of communication and coordination, limited resources, insufficient capacity to meet overwhelming demands, and gendered and racialized mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion. The personal and collective health burdens borne by these front-line recovery workers--predominantly women and people of color - exemplify the ways in which the social relations of power and control contribute to health and social inequities.

The odd couple: using biomedical and intersectional approaches to address health inequities

ABSTRACT Background: Better understanding and addressing health inequities is a growing global priority. Objective: In this paper, we contribute to the literature examining complex relationships between biological and social dimensions in the field of health inequalities. Specifically, we explore the potential of intersectionality to advance current approaches to socio-biological entwinements. Design: We provide a brief overview of current approaches to combining both biological and social factors in a single study, and then investigate the contributions of an intersectional framework to such work. Results: We offer a number of concrete examples of how intersectionality has been used empirically to bring both biological and social factors together in the areas of HIV, post-traumatic stress disorder, female genital circumcision/mutilation/cutting, and cardiovascular disease. Conclusion: We argue that an intersectional approach can further research that integrates biological and social aspects of human lives and human health and ultimately generate better and more precise evidence for effective policies and practices aimed at tackling health inequities.

Hurricane Katrina and the Forgotten Coast of Mississippi: Powering an Unequal Recovery

The study of natural disasters is particularly challenging, as they are enormously complex and demand mastery of a number of disciplines ordinarily beyond the reach of any individual researcher working alone. The full sociological, geographical, historical, economic, cultural, political, and physical impacts of – and recovery from – a natural disaster are so vast, the contours so manifold and complicated, that only a genuinely and thoroughly interdisciplinary approach can begin to master the scope, scale, and meaning of the event. Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast of the United States in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume’s highly interdisciplinary approach examines the full impact of the disaster on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast shared the impact of the hurricane, their socioeconomic and demographic compositions varied widely, leading to different types and rates of recovery. This volume combines baseline geographic data on the social and built environment and the hazard vulnerability of the region with a historical narrative on past conditions that infl uenced the pre-Katrina settlement history. It further includes a statistical analysis of historical rates of settlement and demographic change in the region and forecasts the future trajectory of settlement and demographic change post Katrina. This volume not only furthers our understanding of the pace of recovery and its geographic extent, but also explores the role of inequalities in the recovery process and those antecedent conditions that could give rise to a “recovery divide.” It will be especially appealing to researchers and advanced students of natural disasters and policy makers dealing with disaster consequences and recovery.

Racial and Ethnic Health Inequities: An Intersectional Approach

Nowhere is the severity and impact of racism on our nation and its people clearer and more profound than in the arena of health—where racism is literally a matter of life and death. Employing an intersectional lens, this essay addresses four aspects of the complex relationship between health and race, ethnicity, and other systems of inequality. First, we situate the national discourse on health care disparities in an historical and social movement context, followed by several ways that racial and ethnic differences in health are defined. Second, we provide an overview of data on differences in health and health care. Third, we examine dominant and critical models for explaining the differences, specifically comparing traditional biomedical approaches with intersectional social constructionist approaches. We conclude with proposed strategies to reduce and eliminate health inequities across race, ethnicity, gender, and social class.

The collective method: collaborative social science research and scholarly accountability:

This article conceptualizes the collective method to describe how 12 scholars worked collaboratively to study the effects of displacement following Hurricane Katrina. The collective method is defined as an integrated, reflexive process of research design and implementation in which a diverse group of scholars studying a common phenomenon-yet working on independent projects-engage in repeated theoretical and methodological discussions to improve (1) research transparency and accountability and (2) the rigor and efficacy of each member’s unique project. This process generates critical discussions over researchers’ and respondents’ positionality, the framework of intersectionality, and applied ethics. Informed by feminist theoretical and methodological considerations of reflexivity, insider-outsider positionality, power relations, and social justice, the collective method can enhance scholars’ standpoints regarding philosophical, ethical, and strategic issues that emerge in the research process.