Current Boyd/Williams Recipients (2011-12)

Emma Amador

(Anthropology and History)
Welfare is Work: Public Assistance, Migration, and Gender in Puerto Rican Communities, 1935-70
This dissertation is a transnational history of welfare in Puerto Rico told from the perspective of the Puerto Rican women who were welfare’s administrators and targets.  Here welfare includes not only specific public assistance programs, but also a broader welfare state, built by New Deal and populist reformers in the 1930s-1970.  This welfare state was concerned not just with providing a safety net, but also with training poor women as domestic workers and properly gendered subjects, and regulating their migration to the mainland.  The experiences of social workers and domestic workers applying for welfare illuminate how they were both recipients of benefits of the welfare state and working women.  Using oral histories alongside documentary sources such as case files, this project seeks to understand how welfare shaped Puerto Ricans' diverse experiences of gender, race, labor, migration, and citizenship.

Jennifer Torres

(Sociology)
Lactation Consultants, Doulas, and the Medical Maternity System
The proposed research is an ethnographic study of two occupational groups that are working to transform maternity care practices: International Board Certified Lactation Consultants and DONA International birth doulas.  Through participant observation and in-depth interviews with lactation consultants, doulas, their clients, and maternity clinicians, this research will compare the strategies used by lactation consultants and doulas to navigate occupational boundaries and gain entrance to the medical maternity system, and will examine the effects of their methods of entry on their ability to effect change.  This examination will consider the influence of the medicalization of childbirth and breast-feeding and the role of care work.