The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Category: Care policy

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Care policy Events Grants Social inequality & justice

Holyoke Youth Present Video Narratives about Sexual Disparities and Parenting

Young parents from Holyoke will publicly present digital stories next week that were produced as part of “Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice,” a collaborative project between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and several grassroots advocacy organizations.

The first-person video narratives feature parents who have been involved in the Care Center, a Holyoke-based alternative education program for pregnant and parenting teens who have dropped out of high school. They will present their short videos on Wednesday, May 7 from noon to 2:00 p.m. at the Visitor’s Center at Holyoke Heritage State Park. In addition to screening digital stories, this event will include a project overview, participatory activities for the audience and a panel from the storytellers.

Holyoke has the highest rate of births in Massachusetts to young women ages 15 to 19. Although there are many young parents in the community, they seldom have an opportunity to share their experiences with the public. The Hear Our Stories project is funded by the Ford Foundation and uses personal stories to educate the public about how young parenting women experience and negotiate sexual disparities. With training and production help from the Center for Digital Storytelling, the participating parents combined audio recordings, still and moving images, and music or other sounds to communicate an experience in the form of a video story.

This project is a collaboration of the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, Department of Anthropology and the Center for Public Policy and Administration; the Care Center; the Center for Digital Storytelling; the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy; the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at UMass Boston.

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Care policy Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research

Misra to Serve as Family Research Scholar in 2013-14

Professor Joya Misra (sociology and public policy) is one of six university faculty members chosen to be a Family Research Scholar at the Center for Research on Families (CRF) during the 2013-14 academic year.

As the selected scholars prepare significant grant proposals focused on family research, CRF provides them with time, technical expertise, peer mentorship and consultation with national experts. The program aims to bring together a diverse group of faculty from throughout the UMass community to foster innovation and collaboration across research areas related to the family.

Misra’s research explores how and why inequalities develop over time across different countries’ poverty and labor markets. Her analyses are focused through the lenses of class, race and ethnicity, citizenship and gender. She has served as the editor of the journal Gender & Society since 2011. The grant proposal that Misra will develop during her time as a CRF scholar centers around a new examination of the relationship between gender and earnings in 18 advanced industrialized countries between 1985 and 2010.

CRF’s mission is to increase research on family issues; build a multidisciplinary community of researchers who are studying issues of relevance to families; connect national and internationally prominent family researchers with UMass faculty and students; provide advanced data analytic methods training and consultation; and disseminate family research findings to scholars, families, practitioners and policymakers. The other 2013-14 scholars are Elizabeth Harvey and Agnès Lacreuse (psychology); Jonathan Rosa (anthropology); Gwyneth Rost (communication disorders); and Lisa Troy (nutrition).

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Care policy Events Faculty Research

Bushouse to Speak During “Mothers in Academia” Panel

Associate Professor Brenda Bushouse (political science and public policy) will speak on a panel called “Mothers in Academia” on Friday, Feb. 15, in Campus Center Room 803 from 2 to 4 p.m.

The panel is presented by the UMass Center for Teaching and Faculty Development’s Mutual Mentoring Initiative. It will feature contributors to the forthcoming book Mothers in Academia (Columbia University Press, May 2013) who will discuss their experiences with the conditions of working motherhood and academic life.

Panelists include:

  • Kirsten Isgro, SUNY Plattsburgh
  • Vanessa Adel, UMass Amherst
  • Wendy Wilde, UMass Amherst
  • Allia Matta, CUNY LaGuardia Community College
  • Brenda Bushouse, UMass Amherst
  • Mari Castañeda, UMass Amherst, moderator
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Care policy Faculty Research

Misra Co-Authors Article Dispelling Academic Parental Leave Myth

Professor Joya Misra (sociology and public policy) has published a new article dispelling the myth that male faculty members in higher education abuse family leave policies by focusing on research rather than parenting during their time off.

The article, “Parental Leave Usage by Fathers and Mothers at an American University,” is in the January issue of the journal Fathering. Misra co-authored the study with Associate Professor Jennifer Lundquist (sociology) and former School of Education faculty member KerryAnn O’Meara, now of the University of Maryland.

In a 2006-2009 study at a major research university, Misra, Lundquist and O’Meara found that 72 percent of those who took paid parental leave were women. Those men who did take paid leave often had spouses who had to return to work. Still, many men whose partners are not full-time homemakers said they did not take advantage of the university’s paid leave benefit out of fear that doing so would have a negative impact on their professional advancement.

These findings contradict a widespread and long-standing assumption that male professors take advantage of paid leave benefits by taking time off even when their spouses are full-time homemakers or the primary caregivers. The new findings have received substantial attention both inside academia and in the mainstream media, with articles appearing in Inside Higher Ed; phsyorg.com; and News Blaze in Australia.

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Care policy Grants Social inequality & justice

CPPA Faculty and Staff to Work on Collaborative Youth Sexual Justice Project

The Ford Foundation has just approved funding for a two-year $500,000 collaborative project, “Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice,” based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and led by Aline Gubrium in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and Elizabeth Krause in the Department of Anthropology. The competitive proposal was submitted in response to the Ford Foundation’s Sexuality Research Initiative, “Sexuality, Health and Rights Among Youth in the United States: Transforming Public Policy and Public Understanding Through Social Science Research.”

Gubrium was a participant in the Center for Public Policy and Administration’s 2009-2010 grants workshop, an interdisciplinary fellowship program aimed at helping social sciences and public policy faculty develop effective grant proposals. Krause is a CPPA faculty associate, and CPPA Director M.V. Lee Badgett and Associate Director for Communications Michal Lumsden will sit on the “Hear Our Stories” advisory board.

“Hear Our Stories” involves six local, state and national partners, including the Care Center in Holyoke, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the Center for Digital Storytelling, the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy, the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at UMass Boston, and the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program at Hampshire College.

The project uses new media and sensory ethnography to reveal how diasporic youth experience and negotiate sexual health disparities, and prioritizes uprooted young parenting Latinas, whose material conditions and cultural worlds have placed them in tenuous positions, both socially constructed and experientially embodied. The aim is to transform assumptions about young parenting Latinas through the novel use of digital storytelling to recalibrate the conversation on young motherhood and sexuality, health, and rights across generations.

Research, training and strategic communication components are included. Four Ford Ph.D. fellows, four masters-level students, and youth participants will all have opportunities to participate in these components toward the goal of using social science research methods and collaborating with partners to analyze and transform the problem-oriented, stigmatizing discourse on young motherhood and youth sexuality.

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Care policy Events

Kunin Shared Hopeful Message on Next Steps for Women’s Rights

Madeleine M. Kunin, former governor of Vermont and ambassador to Switzerland, told an audience of about 80 on Tuesday that it’s high time women were able to fully realize the goals that feminists set in the 1960s. And, she said in an upbeat message, achieving those goals is possible.

“Social critique, prodded by grassroots activism and the law, has created change,” Kunin said during a talk at the Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA).

Kunin’s latest book, The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family, shows how feminists in the second half of the 20th century paved the way for improved rights and freedom for women in the United States today. For example, women now comprise nearly 60 percent of college undergraduates and half of all medical and law students. Most women today work outside the home, and families with two wage earners are the norm. Still, Kunin’s book points out, while women have changed, social structures surrounding work and family have remained static.

In her talk, Kunin highlighted three major areas that need to be reformed in order for women to enjoy full workplace equality: Access to affordable, high-quality daycare and early childhood education programs; paid maternity and family leave; and workplace flexibility.

Kunin said in order to make gains in these arenas, women — and men — need to push to change federal and workplace policies as well as the culture around these issues. And she offered the audience her recipe for making change: One part each anger, imagination and optimism. Each of the ingredients is key, she said, but optimism is what actually brings ideas to life.

“You have to believe that it’s worth it, that if you take the risk of saying when something isn’t right, that something good is going to happen,” Kunin said.

She urged the audience of Five College students, faculty and staff and members of the local community to voice concerns emphatically enough to get the issues they care about on local, state and national leaders’ agendas. However, Kunin added, it’s not enough just to complain. If you want to truly effect change, you must get directly involved in working to make that change happen.

“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” Kunin said.

This event was hosted by CPPA and co-sponsored by the Center for Research on Families; the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center; Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst; and MotherWoman.

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Care policy Events Faculty Research

Misra Kicks off Fall Faculty Colloquium Series with Family Policy Talk

On Sept. 24, Joya Misra will discuss her recent work in a talk titled “Family Policies, Employment and Poverty among Partnered and Single Mothers Cross-Nationally,” regarding research conducted with Stephanie Moller, Eiko Strader and Elizabeth Wemlinger.

Misra is a professor of sociology and public policy, and is also affiliated with the Labor Studies and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies programs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research and teaching focus around inequality, studying the effect that politics, policies, social movements and culture have on societies. Last year she was named editor of the journal Gender & Society. Much of Misra’s work focuses on gender disparities when it comes to employment policies and family traditions.

This is the first lecture in the fall 2012 Center for Public Policy and Administration’s Faculty Colloquium series, which are informal talks, often about works-in-progress, with presenters providing a significant amount of time for audience discussion and feedback. All talks will be in Thompson 620, from noon to 1 p.m. They are open to the public and brown bag lunches are welcome.

Categories
Care policy Faculty Research Governance Policy Viewpoints Social inequality & justice

Badgett Authors New York Times Op-Ed About Workplace Discrimination

CPPA Director M.V. Lee Badgett (economics) has penned an editorial published in the Feb. 7, 2012, edition of the New York Times. The op-ed, titled “What Obama Should Do About Workplace Discrimination,” highlights how presidents dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt have used executive orders to strengthen anti-discrimination standards for workers employed by federal contractors.

In addition to heading the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Badgett is the research director at UCLA’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy. The New York Times op-ed comes on the heels of a study Badgett just released titled “The Impact of Extending Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Non-Discrimination Requirements to Federal Contractors.”

According to the study, between 14.3 and 15.3 million additional workers could offer health care benefits to their same-sex domestic partners if federal contractors were required to provide coverage for same-sex partners. Badgett points out, however, that employers would not likely incur large increases in their health care costs, as “only 40,000 to 136,000 of these employees would sign up a same-sex partner for coverage, and they would be spread out across tens of thousands of federal contractors.”

The New York Times piece appears in the wake of recent news that defense contractor DynCorp International changed its policies and now bans discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Read Badgett’s full piece here.