2010 Conference Speakers

Dr. Riché Barnes

Cultural Anthropologist, Smith College

Dr. Riché Jeneen Daniel Barnes is a cultural anthropologist in the department of Afro-American studies at Smith College. She holds a M.S. in Urban studies and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Emory University. She completed her undergraduate degree in Political Science at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Barnes specializes in race, class, and gender dynamics in African American families as they are experienced in the U.S. political economy. Her most recent publication is a chapter in the volume The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American Middle Class (2008) where she refutes commonly held iterations of work and family conflict.

Dr. Barnes has also worked with a collaborative research group funded by the National Science Foundation in which she explored similar cultural shifts in Ghana and Uganda as women join the workforce in increasing numbers. Dr. Barnes has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Ford Foundation Dissertation Award, the Sloan Foundation Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life graduate fellowship, and the Marjorie Shostak Prize in Humanistic Ethnographic Writing. At Smith she has received faculty development funds including the Jill Ker Conway Award, the Kahn Institute Faculty Fellowship and has served as a faculty associate to the Smith Center for Work and Life, a student focused center that coaches Smith students constructing their life narratives and choices. Dr. Barnes is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled: Still Uplifting the Race: Black Professional Wives and the Career and Family Debate where she suggests African American professional women experience gender role ambiguity rather than work/family conflict, as they experience social mobility. Additionally the focus on marriage in lieu of career may be a new strategy in the contemporary iterations of the politics of respectability, an early 20th century resistance and activist strategy practiced in the black community following Reconstruction. In addition to her academic and activist endeavors, Dr. Barnes is married and is the mother of three.