Societies in Crisis: Inequities and Social Change

Dr. Roberta Villalón, Professor and Chair of the Department Sociology and Anthropology at St. John’s University will join the Department of Sociology as a guest speaker. In this talk, Professor Roberta Villalón, will share the main findings of her most recent book "Migration, Health, and Inequalities: Critical Activist Research across Ecuadorean Borders" (Bristol University Press, 2022) and highlight how the application of a Latin+ feminist sociological approach was central to her project.  Drawing from field research spanning Ecuador, the United States, and Spain from 2015 to 2019, her book offers a nuanced sociological understanding of the impact of outward and return migration on health and well-being. The author will explain the health processes that migrants and non-migrating relatives undergo as well as the psycho-sociocultural mechanisms they employ to cope with the many difficulties they encounter along the way. Moreover, she will explore multiple migrant families’ experiences and efforts to challenge health, geopolitical, gender, sexual, ethnoracial, and economic disparities transnationally and multigenerationally.  By weaving accounts of migrants, non-migrating relatives and health and migrant service providers, and contextualizing Ecuadorean with other Latin American cases with similar migratory routes, Villalón will offer a thorough picture of interpersonal, institutional, and structural mechanisms of marginalization and resistance from the ground up. Last, but not least, she will discuss the reflective process underlying the theoretical and methodological journey that sustained the development of her activist research project.