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Michele Bolduc

Research Interests:
critical medical geography
political economy
immigration
Haiti
American South
critical pedagogy
Political Ecology
environmental health
planning
Availability

Off campus for fieldwork beginning Summer 2013

Education

MA Geography, University of Georgia, 2009
BA Anthropology, University of Georgia, 2006

Research

I am a critical medical geography interested in the political economy of health and health care, the political ecologies of environmental health, and immigrant health.  I approach these issues from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective, as both a social scientist and a public health scholar.

I am currently completing my dissertation research on immigrant health care in the farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida.  My dissertation project -- currently funded by an NSF DDRI -- investigates five aspects of health care delivery: (1) I explore the politics of immigrant health care through the lens of deservingness to care through policy analysis at the state and federal level; (2) I look at the changing availability of health care services to immigrant women within in the context of health reform and immigration reform using quantitative and spatial data; (3) I use interview data from health care providers in Immokalee to explain how the changing politics of immigrant health care affects the provision of health services for immigrant women; (4) Using feminist qualitative GIS and interviews with Haitian women, I investigate their experiences of the resulting health care system in Immokalee, as well as how these experiences influence where and how they utilize health care services; and (5) I identify the socio-spatial barriers that Haitian immigrant women face in accessing care in an effort to improve health care accessiblity in the community.  I will defend my dissertation in early Spring 2018.

I have over seven years of teaching experience in both geography and public health, and I have received two teaching awards based on student evaluations.  As a graduate student, I co-founded a Critical Pedagogy Working Group at the University of Kentucky.

I am currently living on 12 acres in Georgia while writing my dissertation and working full-time.  In my (unfortunately limited) spare time, I enjoy reading, hiking, traveling, dancing, cooking, picking up hobbies and then not having time to do them, and spending time in the woods with my family.