Read the latest published research from our department

Faculty affiliated with the Global Health Program conduct research in multiple disciplines across several departments and programs at the University of Oregon. Faculty members engage in research as diverse and varied as bioethical research, biocultural analyses of stress biomarkers, historical analyses of health interventions and disease prevention campaigns, sociological studies of racial/ethnic determinants of health, narrative analyses of health and mental health cross-culturally, and psychological research on healthy development across the life-course.

Read about more recently published research below.

Sugar and Tension – Diabetes and Gender in Modern India, 2018, Rutgers University Press.

Lesley Jo Weaver, associate professor of Global Studies

Women in North India are socialized to care for others, so what do they do when they get a disease like diabetes that requires intensive self-care? In Sugar and Tension, Lesley Jo Weaver uses women’s experiences with diabetes in New Delhi as a lens to explore how gendered roles and expectations are taking shape in contemporary India. Weaver argues that although women’s domestic care of others may be at odds with the self-care mandates of biomedically-managed diabetes, these roles nevertheless do important cultural work that may buffer women’s mental and physical health by fostering social belonging. Weaver describes how women negotiate the many responsibilities in their lives when chronic disease is at stake. As women weigh their options, the choices they make raise questions about whose priorities should count in domestic, health, and family worlds. The varied experiences of women illustrate that there are many routes to living well or poorly with diabetes, and these are not always the ones canonized in biomedical models of diabetes management.

Access the book via Rutgers University Press and visit Lesley Jo Weaver’s website.

Care across Generations: Solidarity and Sacrifice in Transnational Families, 2017, Stanford University Press

Kristin E. Yarris, associate professor of Global Studies

Care Across Generations takes a close look at grandmother care in Nicaraguan transnational families, examining both the structural and gendered inequalities that motivate migration and caregiving as well as the cultural values that sustain intergenerational care. Kristin E. Yarris broadens the transnational migrant story beyond the parent–child relationship, situating care across generations and embedded within the kin networks in sending countries. Rather than casting the consequences of women's migration in migrant sending countries solely in terms of a "care deficit," Yarris shows how intergenerational reconfigurations of care serve as a resource for the wellbeing of children and other family members who stay behind after transnational migration. Moving our perspective across borders and over generations, Care Across Generations shows the social and moral value of intergenerational care for contemporary transnational families.

Access the book via Stanford University Press.