Please see my Google Scholar page for the most up-to-date list of my publications. If you would like to read any of these publications and do not have institutional access, please email me directly.
I am an interdisciplinary scholar doing research at the intersection of criminology and public health. My primary research areas concern justice-involved women, women’s victimization, substance use, health inequity, and qualitative research methods. I describe my scholarship as consistent with the traditions of community-based participatory research (CBPR). CBPR strategies offer an opportunity for researchers to partner with communities to do public, translational work that has direct impact and are highly consistent with the traditions of feminist and critical social science in that there is an emphasis on equitable researcher-community partnerships and power-sharing, analyzing experiences within context and structure, and on action-oriented research that advances social justice.
Dissertation Research: Substance Use and Motherhood
My dissertation research examined the experiences of women who used alcohol or other drugs during their pregnancies. I conducted in-depth interviews with a community sample of 30 pregnant or mothering women to explore how their fear of criminal justice and child welfare involvement discouraged them from seeking regular prenatal care and exacerbated existing barriers to treatment and support services. I analyzed the way women drew on examples from their life stories to construct images of themselves as good mothers even in the face of stigma experienced by people who use drugs, which is intertwined with racism and classism. I also looked at how many women engaged in harm reduction strategies like reducing their substance use or switching to something they perceived as less harmful, even as they were embedded in contexts of intimate partner abuse, housing insecurity, food insecurity, and other forms of structural disadvantage. This study produced multiple publications, including an open-access article in the journal Health and Justice that has been cited extensively by fellow scholars, journalists, and attorneys.
Recent Work: Intimate Partner Violence and Substance Use
Together with Emily Rothman (Boston University School of Public Health) and Diane Kinney, Co-Director of a women’s shelter and service provider, I received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Research Leaders (IRL) fellowship. We developed a project to examine the co-occurring experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) and opioid use disorder (OUD) in rural Vermont. This three-phase project involved a qualitative needs assessment of rural Vermont residents with experience of IPV and OUD, collaborative intervention development, and intervention implementation and evaluation. We completed qualitative data collection (Journal of Rural Health, 2021) and brought our results to the community through an all-day workshop that I led in October 2019. Workshop participants included our community advisory board of people with lived experience of SUD and IPV along with 35 professionals from government and non-profit human services including substance use treatment and recovery support, children’s protective services, advocates for survivors of IPV and sexual assault, and others.
One evidence-supported idea that arose from the workshop was a cross-training curriculum for IPV advocates and SUD recovery peer coaches. I worked with our community partner organizations to develop the curriculum for a full-day cross-training workshop for IPV community advocates and peer recovery coaches. I held the cross-training workshop online in February 2021 for 40 participants and collected pre- and post-workshop data to determine participant learning and satisfaction (Victims & Offenders, 2022). I also conducted an additional 20 interviews with members of the local Coordinated Community Response team, a multidisciplinary group of professionals in careers related to IPV, about how the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted their work.
Our project received attention from local and specialized national news outlets (Burlington Press, Rewire, Verywell Health). We worked with an Australian company to produce a short video about our Phase I results to share our research more broadly. Our project has spurred the development of a new women’s recovery residence near our study site and has also resulted in greater representation of IPV community advocates on committees and task forces responding to Vermont’s drug-related mortality crisis. Ms. Kinney’s organization used this research to secure funding to pay for their advocates to be trained as substance use recovery coaches so that they can better meet their community’s needs. I was honored to be recognized by the American Society of Criminology’s largest division, the Division on Women and Crime, with the 2022 Community Engaged Scholar Award, which recognizes “an individual who is a leader in teaching, outreach, or scholarship initiatives defined by innovative community engagement.”
Additional Research Interests
I have also continued my research in women’s justice system involvement, specifically how women with histories of justice system involvement “make good” or change their lives. My article in the British Journal of Criminology examines how women develop life-story narratives that resist the stigma of being mothers who used illicit drugs. I published an analysis of women’s identity change and primary desistance while on parole (Feminist Criminology, 2018) and an interdisciplinary study combining a framework from health communications research with data from substance-involved pregnant women and mothers (Victims & Offenders, 2019). I am a member of the Women and Incarceration Project, a group doing public-facing research and service to bring attention to the harm of women’s incarceration. In this role, I recently helped to organize an all-day conference hosted by Suffolk Law School titled Decarcerating Women Today: Charting a Path. This event brought together attorneys, advocates, social workers, elected representatives, and formerly incarcerated women to promote awareness of legal pathways to release women from MCI-Framingham and other prisons.
I have applied my expertise in the intersections of criminal justice and public health to analyses of popular media and public opinion data. I led a media analysis study of online news narratives of the police shooting of 14-year-old Tamir Rice (Race & Justice, 2019). We found that the immediate reporting of the event largely reproduced the police press release, as is typical for crime reporting, and used rhetorical techniques to depict Tamir as dangerous and threatening and to erase the agency of the police. I collaborated with my coauthor from that study on a survey experiment examining labeling and framing effects on public support for overdose prevention sites (Criminology & Public Policy, 2022). With the same author team, we conducted an experiment that explored public perceptions of a hypothetical local official imposing varying levels of punitive policy to enforce COVID-19 isolation requirements, connecting public health actions and criminological theories of procedural justice and bounded authority.