Research

  • My research interests concern the relationship between epistemology, justice and how individuals and communities resist injustice, with a specific focus on epistemic, carceral,  health and scientific  injustice.  My interest and commitment to intersectional, transdisciplinary, critical, and case-generated research travels through all of my research projects
  •  The Limits of Knowledge,, my 2015 National Science Foundation funded book, provides an understanding of what pragmatist feminist theories look like in practice through using case studies to demonstrate some of the particular ways that dominant scientific and medical practices fail to meet the health needs of marginalized groups and communities. Examples include a community action group fighting environmental injustice in Bayview Hunters Point, California, one of the most toxic communities in the US; gender, race, age, and class biases in the study and diagnosis of endometriosis; a critique of Evidence-Based Medicine; the current effects of Agent Orange on Vietnamese women and children; and pediatric treatment of Amish and Mennonite children. 
  • Current projects include: 
    • Co-edited with Andrea Doucet, Lorraine Code: Thinking Responsibly, Thinking Ecologically.  State University of New York Press. Forthcoming 2020.
    • Co-edited with Heidi Grasswick, Making the Case: Feminist and Critical Race Theorists Investigate Cases, State University of New York Press. Forthcoming 2020.  
    • Co-written with my prison writing group, LoCI-Wittenberg University Writing Group, “An Epistemology of Incarceration: Constructing Knowing on the Inside” (philoSOPHIA 6.1 9-26.​)  
    • Co-written with Corina Cleveland, “Sentenced to Death: Incarceration, Healthharm, and Institutional Epistemic Injustice” in E. Victor and L. Guidry-Grimes, Applying Nonideal Theory to Bioethics: Living and Dying in a Nonideal World, Springer Publishing, forthcoming.
    • “Communities of Epistemic Resistance: Patricia Hill Collins and the Power of Naming Community: Symposium on Patricia Hill Collins,” The Pluralist, 2019, 4.
    • Co-written with Corina Cleveland, “Backlash: Epistemic Violence and the Undoing of Justice: Symposium on George Yancy’s What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Race in America,  Syndicate, forthcoming. 

Teaching

  • Since 2010 I have been teaching in prisons and juvenile detention centers, with traditional college students and students who are incarcerated as co-learners in a carceral setting.  Here is a link to a Wittenberg Magazine article about an early  version of a course that was taught at The Clark County Juvenile Detention Center.
  • I also teach a course entitled Science in Social Context that involves a significant community engagement component, focusing on community health and related environmental issues. In 2020 we are engaging in a project on redlining in Springfield, OH and its ongoing affects on health, education, poverty, and mobility in Springfield. The course project links to a larger community partnership project, The Redlining Education and Change Coalition. (See link below for more information.)  Previously in this course  we completed a project-based learning experience in which we studied the Tremont City Barrel Fill, an U.S. EPA Superfund Site. We met with the U.S. EPA, a community action group, People for Safe Water and held a public display of our research to provide information to our community. Over 200 community members attended. 
  • In 2016 I taught in Wittenberg, Germany, directing our Wittenberg in Wittenberg Program, one of Wittenberg University's flagship international study programs through which Wittenberg University students spend a semester studying in Wittenberg, Germany, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation

Community Engagement

  • Much of my community engagement is done through my teaching in which I integrate engagement between students and the broader community. Much of this can be seen in my Inside-Out teaching and my Science and Social Context course. In 2018 partnered with Safe Harbor House, which is a residential safe house and reentry program for women who were formerly incarcerated. Instead of going to a prison, as I do for my other courses that engage with incarceration,, the students from Safe Harbor House come to my college to have together with Wittenberg students for my Gender and Global Justice course. I don't view these as community service, but instead as means for all of us to be challenged to think critically, carefully and compassionately immersed within our local and global communities. 
  • In 2011 a group of my Inside-Out students, myself, and community members started a restorative justice project, called The Restorative Justice Initiative. For this program we trained 43 community members in restorative justice practices. This training and the ongoing restorative justice work is a collaboration of the Clark County Juvenile Court,_  Project Jericho, and Wittenberg University's Department of Philosophy and the Hagen Center for Civic and Urban Engagement. The training was led by the International Institute for Restorative Justice. Community members that were trained work in the juvenile courts, schools, at Wittenberg University, in social services, and in local schools.