CANCELLED: Seminar Series: Courtney Thomas, Sociology, University of Kentucky
When |
Feb 15, 2016
from 12:00 PM to 01:00 PM |
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Where | 1101 Morrill Hall |
Contact Name | Tiffany Pittman |
Contact Phone | 301-405-6403 |
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About the Talk
Does uncertainty about the occurrence of racism contribute to poor health among black Americans? Despite a substantial literature documenting an association between experiences of perceived discrimination and increased health risk, the mechanisms linking more subtle race-based stressors and well-being remain unclear. Here, I develop a new construct called, “ambiguous discrimination stress,” which is a multidimensional stressor characterized by experiences of uncertainty or ambiguity about whether racial discrimination is actually occurring. I draw on a subsample of black Americans from the Nashville Stress and Health Study (N=636) to assess the social distribution of ADS and examine the extent to which ADS is a source of intragroup physical and mental health differences among blacks.
About the Speaker
Dr. Thomas received a PhD in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2015 and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology with an appointment in the African American & Africana Studies Program. She is also recently began a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship in the department of Community Health Sciences at UCLA. Although formally trained as a medical sociologist, Dr. Thomas uses multiple perspectives and methodologies to consider issues of health inequality, race and ethnicity, aging and the life course, and gender and socioeconomic stratification. Her recent work focuses on conceptualizing and measuring race-based stressors, identifying effective psychological and behavioral coping processes, and examining the interplay between structural, contextual, and psychosocial factors that contribute to inter- and intragroup health disparities across the life course.
Visit Professor Thomas's webpage
Please note that, at the present time, Morrill Hall is not accessible for handicapped individuals.