Dr. Fayana Richards
Assistant Professor
About Dr. Richards
Dr. Richards received their MPH and PHD in medical anthropology from Michigan State University in 2015 and 2018. They completed a postdoc residency in University of Massachusetts, Amherst's School of Public Health and Health Sciences with the Center for Community Health Equity Research and maintains a faculty affiliation.
Broadly speaking, their research agenda seeks to understand how older adults' experience of aging, health and wellbeing are influenced by dynamics produced within interpersonal relations and socio-political economic processes in the U.S. They are interested in how intersections of raced, classed, and gendered subjectivities and hierarchies contextualize health inequities for older Black women and their families. Dr. Richards's dissertation explored the social, affective, and structural context of grandchild caregiving among older Black women in Detroit, Michigan. Their findings demonstrated how perceptions of wellbeing and kinship care were tied to gendered, racialized and generational expectations of care and emotional labor. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Pearl J. Aldrich Foundation, and The Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation.
Interests and Expertise
Medical anthropology; chronic illness and biomedicine; urban public health; aging, care and kinship; race and gender; United States.