Community Development Graduate Group

Natalia Deeb-Sossa, an Associate professor in the University of California at Davis’ Chicana/o Studies Department, has conducted research in medical sociology, social psychology, symbolic interaction, race, class and gender, and methodology. All of her work makes contributions to substantive issues in inequality. In her book, Doing Good: Racial Tensions and Workplace Inequalities at a Community Clinic in El Nuevo South (2013) through participant observation and in-depth interviews, Natalia analyzed how workers at a private, not-for-profit health care center reproduce –or resist reproducing– inequalities of race, class and gender in their interactions with each other and in their daily work with the poor, especially Latinas/os. These inequalities are examined in a setting where health care providers face competing goals, conflicting demands, and understaffing.

Her research has also focused on women's reproductive rights; Mexican women’s access to health via formal (institutional) and informal (cultural) avenues; study of curanderas, parteras, yerberas, sources of healthcare for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), family planning, and abortion; and health care issues with Mexican migrant agricultural workers.

Currently, Natalia is examining how Mexican immigrant farm worker mothers, as cultural citizens, are negotiating power and resisting practices and policies of educational and health inequity in their local context. One of her recent articles  "How Race and Ethnicity Shape Health Care Coverage, Costs and Access" can be found on the blog for Gender & Society, an outlet of the official journal of Sociologists for Women in Society.