Cynthia Miki Strathmann, Ph.D.

During my research career I have studied topics in gender and media studies, labor studies, and medical anthropology. While these topics are quite different, all of my research has focused on how people marshal cultural resources to preserve or contest social inequality and their own position in a social structure. When sports fans connect by talking about a game they saw on television, when labor organizers fight negative stereotypes of unions being pushed by management, or when patients become frustrated and insult receptionists in medical clinics, they are all trying to use cultural knowledge to position themselves, and others, in certain ways within particular social structures.
I am currently working as a project manager for the Boundary Crossings project, a longitudinal, ethnographic health disparities study of African American children with chronic illness or disabilities. Health disparities research seeks to understand why different groups of people have different qualities of health. I am using data from this research to understand how this group of children, and their families and health care providers, may be affected by structural issues that impact health care and to suggest future research that could address this crucial issue in social inequality.

Biography
Cynthia Strathmann received her bachelor's degree in Biology and Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1984. She worked at a natural history museum with recent invertebrates and diatoms for four years before beginning a PhD program in Anthropology at UCLA. In graduate school Dr. Strathmann conducted research in the U.S. and Australia, first in gender and media studies and then on labor issues. After finishing her doctorate she served as a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA's Center for Culture and Health at the David Geffen School of Medicine and taught anthropology classes at several Los Angeles colleges. Currently, she is a Research Assistant Professor and project manager for the Boundary Crossings project in the Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at USC.