Naples, Nancy A. 1950(?)-

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NAPLES, Nancy A. 1950(?)-

PERSONAL:

Born c. 1950. Education: Springfield College, B.S. (sociology and anthropology), 1972; New York University, M.A. (education), 1974; City University of New York, M.S.W. (administration and social policy), 1979, Ph.D. (sociology), 1988.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Sociology Department, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Queens College, City University of New York, adjunct lecturer, 1984-86; State University of New York (SUNY), Purchase, lecturer in department of sociology, anthropology, and economics, 1986-87; Columbia University, New York, NY, adjunct lecturer in School of Social Work, 1987; SUNY, Old Westbury, assistant professor of sociology, 1988-89; Iowa State University, Iowa City, assistant professor of sociology, 1989-92; University of California, Irvine, assistant professor, 1992-98, associate professor of sociology and women's studies, 1998-2001, acting director, 1998, associate director, 1999-2000, director of women's studies program, 2000-01; University of Connecticut, Storrs, associate professor, 2001-03, professor of sociology and women's studies, 2003—. YWCA, New York, NY, director of Community and Social Services, Adolescent Parent Program, and Youth and Family Programs, 1972-80. Lecturer at numerous colleges and universities.

MEMBER:

Sociologists for Women in Society (chair of discrimination committee, 1997-2000; vice president, 2001-03; president, 2003-04), Eastern Sociological Society (council, 2003-05), Society for the Study of Social Problems (chair of conflict, social action, and change division, 1994-96; committee on committees, 1996-99; editorial and publications committee, 2002-05), Pacific Sociological Association (publications committee, 1997-2000; committee on committees, 2001-03), American Political Science Association, American Sociological Association, American Studies Association, International Association for Feminist Economics, International Sociological Association, National Association of Social Workers, National Women's Studies Association, Rural Sociological Society, Rural Women's Studies Association, Social Science History Association.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Mortar Board Award for Contributions to Women, Iowa State University, 1989-90; award for Outstanding Faculty Contributions to Undergraduate Research, Women's Studies Program, University of California at Irvine, 1994-95; recipient of numerous fellowships and grants.

WRITINGS:

Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty, Routledge (New York, NY), 1998.

Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor of chapters to numerous books, including The Field: Readings on the Field Research Experience, edited by Carolyn S. Smith and William Kornblum, second edition, Praeger, 1996; and Women's Studies on Its Own, edited by Mary Bernstein and Renate Reimann, Columbia University Press, 2002. Contributor of articles and reviews to scholarly journals, including Gender and Society, American Journal of Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Rural Sociology, Signs, Social Justice, and Feminist Economics. Editorial board member, Rose Monograph Series, ASA/Sage Publications; associate editor, Social Problems, 1999-2002; member of editorial board, Gender and Society, 1993-98, Journal of Poverty, Journal of Progressive Human Services, and Rural Sociology.

EDITOR

(Also author of introduction and contributor) Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing across Race, Class, and Gender, Routledge (New York, NY), 1998.

(With Karen Bojar, and contributor) Teaching Feminist Activism: Strategies from the Field, Routledge (New York, NY), 2002.

(With Manisha Desai; and contributor) Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics, Routledge (New York, NY), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Restructuring the Heartland: Racialization and Social Regulation of Citizenship.

SIDELIGHTS:

Feminist activist and educator Nancy A. Naples has written about such subjects as low-income women's community activism, social policies designed to counter poverty in the United States, the construction of inequality in rural communities, and methodology and research in women's studies and feminism. A professor of sociology and women's studies at the University of Connecticut, Naples has taught at many universities in the United States and has been involved in social work in New York City.

The author of numerous articles on the roles of women, Naples has also edited several books on feminism and written other titles. Her first book, Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty, is an analysis of women fighting against poverty in low-income neighborhoods of both Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York. Utilizing in-depth interviews of over sixty women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, Naples provides new insight into the idea of work and motherhood from the viewpoint of women on the margins. Some of the interviewees had been on welfare and had lived most of their lives in poverty, developing specific strategies to survive and care for their families. These women all were community workers, and Naples's oral history asks "several key questions," according to Karen Kahn in the Women's Review of Books. One key question revolves around the motivation behind the women's willingness to take on community work. Kahn found that Naples had several agenda at work in the book and complained of having difficulty "see[ing] Naples' forest through her trees," but concluded that "Grassroots Warriors is a powerful argument for community organizing, and for social welfare policies that support it."

Naples has also teamed up with others, as well as worked on her own, to edit further volumes dealing with feminist issues. In the 1998 title Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing across Race, Class, and Gender, she brings together "a collection of qualitative social-scientific studies of women's organizing in the recent or contemporary United States," according to Felicia Kornbluh in Signs. Kornbluh further explained that the "articles in this volume discuss a vast range of women's groups, efforts at building communities, and challenges to local forms of power." Such topics as organizing Latina domestic workers in San Francisco, California, or creating a family auxiliary for a miners' strike are dealt with in the book. Kornbluh also mentioned that "much of the scholarship in this volume is based on participant observation by scholars who think of themselves as activists as well," and the study overall serves as "an enormously valuable" contribution to the ongoing study of "women's political work." Reviewing Community Activism and Feminist Politics in the Women's Review of Books, Lois Rita Helbold praised its editor for challenging "the strand of rhetorical feminist thinking that reduces women to heroic cardboard cut-outs."

In collaboration with Manisha Desai, Naples also edited the 2002 collection Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and TransnationalPolitics. The book addresses, as Julie Beck noted in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, "women's international activism in the face of economic and political globalization," and further "seeks mainly to deepen our understandings of the complexities and challenges of women's activism against globalization." Divided into several sections, Women's Activism and Globalization looks first at the manner in which local community-based organizations can work in tandem with other similar organizations internationally. Another section examines how international treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement affect people on the community level. In the book's final section, editors and contributors look at how both community-based and national women's groups operate through the auspices of institutions such as the United Nations and NGOs, or international non-governmental agencies. Using case studies, the contributors offer findings from Nicaragua to Okinawa, Japan. For Beck, "the biggest achievement of this collection is that it makes women's responses to globalization visible, and thus it succeeds in offering a feminist intervention into the faceless, corporate-institutional and masculine sphere of global politics."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, June, 2003, Julie Beck, review of Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics, p. 171.

Signs, winter, 2001, Felicia Kornbluh, review of Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing across Race, Class, and Gender, p. 606.

Women's Review of Books, December, 1998, Lois Rita Helbold, review of Community Activism and Feminist Politics, p. 17; February, 1999, Karen Kahn, review of Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty, p. 14.