My Finnish Fulbright Fantasy

I was honored to be the recipient of the Fulbright-Saastamoinen Foundation Distinguished Chair in Health Sciences 2018-2019.

This Fulbright, as a Distinguished Chair, differs from most -- it is for two separate month-long trips.

The work I did there includes returning to a project I did in the Netherlands on a Fulbright over 20 years ago, interviewing prenatal care providers on their experience and understandings of how prenatal diagnosis affects pregnancy as a social and emotional experience. That work was published as SPOILING THE PREGNANCY (click to read here) by the Dutch Midwifery Foundation. I am engaged in ongoing work with Finnish colleagues, particularly Johanna Sarlio-Nieminen and the Kone Foundation, looking at birth care and services in Finland.

Air rights and local politics

Not all of my writing is strictly sociology. I have been working with the Lower East Side “East River Park Action Organization” to save the park running alongside the East River, mostly right along a stretch of public housing, from being razed, from having 1000 trees destroyed, in an ill-advised plan for coastal resiliency.  

Click here to read my op-ed on air rights on Bowery Boogie. (Alternate link here).

My Bowery Boogie op-ed on trees can be read here, and another on the East River Park Resiliency Project is here.

Update: An article in The Village Sun about racist rezoning in NY here.

African American Midwifery: A History and a Lament

It's a great source of pleasure to be working now with my former student, my 'progeny' Keisha Goode. We did a presentation of our joint work at the American Sociological Association meetings in a panel honoring the legacy of Ida B Wells. And we've published this article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. We're also completing a reference book on Pregnancy and Birth in America for ABC-CLIO -- aimed particularly at HS and College undergrads.

Click here to read.