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In the News:

• Celebrate the Launch of the UW Data Science Minor (11/16/2020)
• Seattle Times Quotes LaShawnDa Pittman on Teaching During Covid-19 (4/14/2020)
• When the Ends Don’t Meet: The Economic Survival Strategies of African American Grandmothers Raising Their Grandchildren (4/25/2020)
• Pittman Elected Chair of the American Sociological Association Section on Race, Gender, and Class (6/8/2021)
• LaShawnda Pittman’s Book Published! Grandmothering While Black (UC Press) (2/27/2023)

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As an urban poverty ethnographer, Dr. Pittman’s research focuses primarily on social policy; carework; health disparities; aging; race, class, and gender; and more. Specifically, she examines the coping experiences of socially marginalized women, including Black women living with HIV/AIDS and low-income, urban Black grandmothers caring for their grandchildren. She is currently focusing on three distinct but interrelated aspects of grandparent caregiving: (1) Her forthcoming book, Coerced Mothering: Caregiving and African American Grandmothers examines the coercive forces that compel grandmothers to provide care under the harshest conditions and affiliated questions concerning individual coping responses, institutional and familial barriers and resources; (2) recent manuscripts investigate the structural lag between grandparent-headed households and safety net programs; and (3) a mixed methods project utilizing qualitative and biomarker methodologies examines the stress-mediated health impacts of low-income, African American grandmothers raising their grandchildren. This innovative design approach offers the potential for clarifying the sequence events from stressors to health markers, deepening understandings of the sources and mechanisms leading to health disparities, and for differentiating between person comparisons from within-person variations in response to stressors.

Dr. Pittman’s latest article, How Well Does the “Safety Net” Work for Family Safety Nets? Economic Survival Strategies among Grandmother Caregivers in Severe Deprivation can be found here:

http://rsf-prod.literatumonline.com/doi/full/10.7758/RSF.2015.1.1.05