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Preface
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
xiii Preface The story of how this book came to exist is somewhat unusual, and thus we include it here as a way of charting the intellectual genesis of Mapping “Race.” We intentionally invoke the word “mapping” in the book’s title as a metaphor to capture the complexity of “race” and to emphasize the need for researchers to grapple with that complexity. In early 2010, we received funding from National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHHD) to hold a workshop called “Mapping ‘Race’ and Inequality: Best Practices for Theorizing and Operationalizing ‘Race’ in Health Policy Research.”1 Under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice at the University of New Mexico, which we co-founded in 2009 and then co-directed (2009–2011), and which López now directs, we convened a group of nineteen scholars for a meeting in Albuquerque held April 29–30, 2011. The participants in that intensive dialogue included scholars from the health, social, and biological sciences. They were an almost even mix of scholars whose primary methodological orientation was quantitative analysis versus those who used mixed methods or purely qualitative methods. Beyond those parameters, we self-consciously sought to include scholars who represented diverse race, gender, and ethnic backgrounds, as well as scholars at varied career stages. It is from that initial group of nineteen scholars that the contributors to Mapping “Race” emerged.2 Mapping “Race” has benefitted from the collective excitement and synergy we experienced leading up to the workshop, during our two-day meeting, and in our subsequent conversations. One of the striking things was the degree to which scholars from different disciplines and different methodological traditions were vexed about the same phenomenon: the frequent refusal by scholars doing research on race-based disparities to explicitly conceptualize (much less define) “race” and the accompanying problem of how to most effectively operationalize socially constructed “race.” We were stunned by the similar stories told by participating scholars in the biological sciences (including biology and genetics), the medical sciences (including epidemiology, medicine, and public health), and the social sciences (including anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology) about how existing research in their fields typically engages race in superficial ways that largely ignores theoretical insights relating xiv The Editors to conceptualizing race as socially constructed and, therefore, as historically contingent, dynamic, and multifaceted. And yet, while we agreed on the problem, it was not obvious what the solutions were. Over the course of many conversations, disagreements, and even heated intellectual exchanges, we pushed each other to identify potential solutions and to speak across the traditional boundaries that separated us, such as method, discipline and scientific domain. Mapping “Race” embodies our progress and signals our desire to take this important conversation to a broader audience. We hope that it encompasses the voices of the original workshop participants and the exciting synergy of that collective conversation, as well as the contributions of the authors whose work has evolved into these chapters. We are grateful to many people for helping us realize this publication. We are deeply indebted to the faculty, fellows, administrators, and staff at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Center for Health Policy at UNM. At the Center, we found a generous intellectual community that welcomed us as relative outsiders to health research when we began this journey and that encouraged our efforts to cross disciplinary, science, and methodological boundaries. We are especially grateful to Executive Director Robert Valdez for seeing early promise in our ideas and for supporting us at each step of the way, including in our working group and speakers’ series and symposium on topics related to this research.3 Many Center staffpersons played a role in helping us at various stages, and we are especially grateful to Lia Abeita-Sanchez, Lila Chavez, Sheri Lessanese, Thu Luu, Anita Parmar, Gina Sandoval, Vanessa Tafoya, Maria Vahtel, and Denise Wallen. Antoinette Maestas was especially helpful, working closely with us at several different stages. We thank Cirila Estela Vasquez Guzman, an RWJF Center for Health Policy doctoral fellow in sociology and our research assistant at the Institute (2010–2012), for her assistance on multiple facets of this project. Estela and three other RWJF doctoral fellows contributed immensely as observers at the NIH workshop: Sonia Bettez (sociology), Yahaira Pena-Esparza (psychology), and Vickie Ybarra (political science). We would also like to thank chairs and staff at the School of Law and in the Department...