Current Research

Funding is for a three-year follow-up collaboration with Fudan University to further develop Women's and Gender Studies as an academic field in China, and to build the newly established UM-Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies at Fudan University into a leading academic institution promoting women's and gender studies in China. This collaboration, which takes the form of a dissertation workshop for PhD candidates selected from universities throughout China, will provide a new model of interdisciplinary exchange between Chinese and U.S. scholars. The general aim of the collaboration is to enable feminist transformation of knowledge production in China by hosting dissertation workshops for a cohort of young Chinese scholars who are interested in the emergent field of gender studies, but have no academic resources for advanced learning.

This grant will support an International Conference on Chinese Women and Visual Representation, to be held December 16-19, 2011, at Fudan University. A collaboration between the UM-Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies and the School of Journalism at Fudan University, Shanghai, the conference will feature academic and activist panels, as well as exhibitions of feminist artworks. Conference papers will be published and disseminated, via women's and gender studies networks, as teaching material. Article abstracts, as well as selected feminist artworks related to visual culture studies and feminist media practices, will be published on Web sites in and outside of China. An international network of scholars and activists tied to Chinese feminist visual culture studies will be established. Among the end results will be the promotion of visual culture studies as a new field of feminist engagement with contemporary Chinese mainstream culture as well as a new field of intellectual inquiry of gender and sexuality in the history of Chinese visual culture.

The “Survivor Moms’ Companion’ (SMC) is a manual detailing a psychoeducation intervention to improve the perinatal, mental health, and early parenting outcomes of women survivors of childhood maltreatment and sexual trauma who are also affected by posttraumatic stress spectrum disorders (PTSD). It was created by U-M collaborators Julia Seng, PhD, CNM, and Mickey Sperlich, MA, CPM, as an outcome of their program of research on PTSD and childbearing. Demand for this intervention has been very high, especially from perinatal mental health professionals in British Commonwealth nations where perinatal services often integrate obstetric, psychiatric, and social aspects of care. Demand is also high from maternal-child health agencies that address the needs of indigenous communities. Colleagues in Melbourne are piloting a version tailored to Australia's cultural context.

The Global Feminisms Project is a collaborative international project that examines the history of feminist activism, women’s movements, and academic women’s studies in China, India, Poland, and the United States. We are examining the histories of feminism in local contexts by collecting 10 videotaped oral histories of women’s movement activists, and women’s studies scholars in each country. The project is based in IRWG, which is also the home for the US-site research team. Our international collaborators are: SPARROW, Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women in Mumbai, India; Fundacja Kobiet eFKa (Women’s Foundation eFKa) in Krakow, Poland; China Women’s University in Beijing, China. For more information about the project and to learn how to access the project resources, visit the Global Feminisms website.

This study will examine the association between social engagement and language behavior, and how this association varies by gender. Additionally, we want to assess the feasibility of using a daily diary to collect data about social engagement, especially from those with mild cognitive impairment; and to examine the psychometric properties of an existing social engagement scale. We hypothesize that higher levels of social engagement will be correlated with better language performance. We also expect that diminished social engagement will be associated with the language skills of women more than men, given that women lead more socially related lives.

Our workshop and subsequent edited volume, funded by the National Science Foundation, explore the conditions for contemporary biological-social actors whom we term, “medical migrants”—a category that encompasses both medical tourists and medical refugees. These medical travelers, ranging from poor to affluent, desperate to simply dissatisfied, traverse diverse social and political boundaries to access medical care. In turn, these journeys often produce new forms citizenship that is ever more enmeshed in the domain of biological existence. Under such conditions, the rights and struggles associated with citizenship increasingly take the form of access to medical care, health, and basic survival.

The goal of the project is for University of Michigan and University of Ghana, Accra (UG), students to better understand the expression, conceptualization, and interpretation of mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, in Ghanaian culture. We are particularly interested in the stories of young Accra women that may reflect everyday stressful experiences and that illuminate influences of social, cultural, economic, and political factors on well-being. Additionally, we plan to document the availability and scope of formal and informal mental health support and treatment services in Ghana (especially in the greater Accra area). As a final project, students will develop ideas for interventions to fill such gaps, culminating in the creation of a UG-based program to provide education and support to struggling women in the university and community.

This project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, builds on previous cross-sectional, exploratory research (focusing on gender differences in the nonmedical use of scheduled prescription medications among adolescent and young adult populations using Web-based survey. The study aims are guided by a theoretical model that depicts the domains of risk, which include sex, gender, social class, and race/ethnicity.

This project, funded by Africare-Liberia, will develop and evaluate the effectiveness of Maternal Waiting Homes in Bong County, Liberia. The design will allow us to document the differences among clinics at different time points regarding outcome indicators as well as rapid CATCH indicators. Since it is not possible to attribute differences among clinics to only an essential obstetric service, we will use data collected from individual interviews and mortality audits to complement the quantifiable data and to provide insights into the variables that should be considered as mediators and modifiers in our statistical analyses.

This exploratory project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, proposes to use an existing nationally representative dataset to assess the relationships among sexual orientation, perceived discrimination, substance abuse, mental health, and treatment utilization in the United States. The specific aims are to: (1) assess the prevalence and co-occurrence of substance-use behaviors, DSM-IV substance use, mood and anxiety disorders based on sexual orientation; (2) estimate substance abuse and mental health treatment utilization based on sexual orientation among respondents with and without DSM-IV diagnoses; and (3) examine the association between perceived discrimination and substance use and mental health outcomes among sexual minorities.

The objective of the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is to advance our knowledge regarding longitudinal trajectories of Nonmedical Prescription Drug Misuse (NPDM) using 12 independent, nationally representative cohorts of approximately 180,000 high school seniors between 1997 and 2008 from the Monitoring the Future study. Findings from this project will substantially advance the current understanding of NPDM among adolescents in the United States and provide information that will improve the screening, assessment, prevention, and treatment of prescription drug abuse.

In 1999, the university launched the Web-based Student Life Survey to determine the prevalence of alcohol and other drug use on campus. Data are collected every two years to track students’ behaviors and attitudes particularly as they relate to alcohol and drug use. The trend data are distributed to various academic and administrative units, including the Provost’s Office, Student Affairs, University Housing, University Health Services and Counseling, and Psychological Services. Because of the survey’s effectiveness, the scope of the study has expanded over time.