Professor Carolyn Sargent (front center) with friends in the Dogon region of Mali. She conducts research on West African migrant families in France, traveling to Africa, Europe, and the United States.

My research and teaching are primarily situated in the domain of gender and health, with a particular focus on reproduction, medical decisionmaking, and the management of women’s health in low-income populations. The classes I have most frequently taught and enjoy include an undergraduate course on global gender issues; undergraduate and graduate courses on medical anthropology such as “health, healing, and ethics”; and seminars on gender and health issues.

After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Benin, I spent two years in a West African village documenting the practices of local midwives and other healers, whom I followed as they attended births, prescribed medicinal plants, and engaged in ritual healing. Ultimately this project expanded to study the connections among gender, religion, and medical decisions. My work on “maternity, medicine, and power” reflects six years residence in West Africa.

In addition to working in West Africa (Benin, Mali), I have worked in Jamaica and am now working in France. For the last seven years, I have been conducting fieldwork on reproduction and representations of family among migrants from the Senegal River Valley now residing in Paris. Most recently, my writing has focused on how, in the context of the global economy, colonial and postcolonial relations between France and its former West African colonies have shaped the policies and politics of state institutions responsible for managing immigrant populations. I am interested in how women — as migrants, wives, and mothers — routinely negotiate these structures of inequality. Theoretically, I am interested in questions of agency, structure, and resistance. I have also explored how Islam shapes the discourse of migrant men, especially those housed in worker hostels; provokes debates on women’s autonomy in Europe; and influences women’s reproductive decisions and marital relations.