Benefiting by Design: Women of Color in Feminist Psychological Research (Hardback) | Released: 01 Aug 2008

The presence of women of color within the practical applications of social science research findings is severely limited, since spaces where and when women of color enter the arenas of research methodology, research question and intervention design and knowledge generation is often that of the other. Benefitting by Design addresses this limitation. It does so by locating the experience and knowledge of women of color as its central theme, with sections of the text referring to emerging trends that attend to the need for greater representation of women of color in research and academic settings. A key theme is the dislodging of currently accepted positions for the experience of women of color as marginalized, and subsumed under normative modes of examination to central positions in areas of social science research and clinical practice. This is in response to the typical assumption of the need to 'fix' women of color be it based on their immigration status, sexual orientation, race, culture, class or spiritual practice. Benefitting By Design attends to the salient contexts of the lives of women of color from an emic perspective, by providing models for addressing the limitations that result from exclusion, and strategies for centering the experiential knowledge of women of color in social science research and practice that is designed for their benefit.
About the Author: Chemba Raghavan, Ph.D., is a visiting research scholar of Psychology from New College of Florida and currently serves as a Consultant for the regional headquarters of UNESCO and UNICEF, Bangkok. As a Consultant for the Asia-Pacific Programme on Education for All (APPEAL)-UNESCO, she is the Series Editor for several Advocacy Briefs relating to gender and how to address gender issues in policymaking, in the Asia-Pacific region. At UNICEF, she currently oversees a regional exercise for mapping resources and national data on early childhood from over 30 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. She also continues to publish peer-reviewed articles and make presentations based on her research (Project SAFARI) on immigrant gender role identities in the United States. Arlene E Edwards, Ph.D. is a community psychologist currently affiliated with the Career MPH Program at Emory University and teaches part time in the Department of Psychology at Morehouse College. Her research interests include attending to the themes found in Black women's community work and conducting HIV/AIDS prevention research. She also runs a small nonprofit, The ELVA Collective, aimed at conducting collaborative, community-based work with a specific focus on the lives of Black women. Kim Vaz, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Women's Studies at The University of South Florida, a faculty member of the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies. Vaz is author of The woman with the artistic brush: A life history of Yoruba batik artist, Nike Davies, from M.S. Sharpe Publications, and editor of Black women in America and Oral narrative research with Black women, both from Sage Publications. She has published Many Floridas: Women Envisioning Change (with Rhonda Ovist, Judy Hayden, Sharon Masters, 2007 from Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global (with Judy Hayden and Sharon Masters) again through Cambridge Scholars Publishing. She sees patients in her private practice for psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.