DGHI Faculty Profile: Blankenship Leads DGHI Study of Gender, Poverty and Health

Published October 3, 2008, last updated on March 7, 2013 under Research News

Kim Blankenship started her academic career as a self-proclaimed feminist sociologist, interested in looking at gender issues in the workplace. Over time, she became interested in women’s reproductive rights and focused five years of her career attempting to understand and circumvent the health challenges faced by sex workers in New Haven, CT. Now, as a new faculty member at the Duke Global Health Institute, she is also conducting research to improve the health status of sex workers in India. “It’s remarkable how similar these populations are, despite the cultural differences,” she says. “Some health issues are universal.”

The health of sex workers is only one of the myriad topics that fall under the umbrella of the Duke Global Health Institute’s signature research initiative on Gender, Poverty and Health. Dr. Blankenship, who joined DGHI and the Duke Department of Sociology in May, is leading this initiative. [Read about all of the DGHI Signature Research Initiatives online.]

“Gender, poverty and health studies investigate how gender and socio-economic status, and often race and ethnicity as well, affect health, whether it is through policies about women’s reproductive rights, economic access to health care, issues of violence and abuse, or other ways that social location determines health,” she explains. “There are many faculty at Duke interested in these areas, and I am excited to be working with them to facilitate opportunities for interdisciplinary research.”

Dr. Blankenship is well aware of the power of colleagues to influence research interests. “When I was teaching at Yale and conducting research among sex workers in New Haven to, I began to get a better understanding of the struggles these women had in taking charge of their own health,” she says. “But it was the arrival of Mike Merson to become the Dean of the [Yale] School of Public Health that truly changed the course of my career. It was his passion for global health that pulled me into this arena.”

Combining her sociological focus with her work with New Haven sex workers Dr. Blankenship developed a growing expertise in structural interventions. So in 2003, when Dr. Merson was approached by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a structural interventions component for their India AIDS Initiative (Avahan) he suggested that Dr. Blankenship should take the lead. “It has been an incredible experience,” she says. “There is this great contradiction in India of incredible oppression and marginalization of women, but a powerful feminist movement, and great interest among sex workers in collectively joining together to improve their health and demand greater respect.”

Soon after Dr. Merson became director of the Duke Global Health Institute, he collaborated with the Department of Sociology to recruit Dr. Blankenship to Duke. “While it was difficult to leave Yale/New Haven after so many years, I was excited by the many opportunities to continue my global health work with so many excellent colleagues in an environment that emphasizes interdisciplinarity,” says Blankenship.  .

Now that she is at Duke, Blankenship will continue her research into the context of risk-taking among women, African Americans, and drug users. “Often, the problem is not that they are unaware of the risks of drug abuse, or the possibility of sexually transmitted infections,” she says. “It is a question of what barriers there are in their lives that make it difficult to avoid risk or choose healthy behaviors. I heard a woman in New Haven say that it was actually an advantage to have HIV, because then she could get healthcare and housing assistance. That is not the way the world should work. The issues are very complex, but we need to press forward with research on the context of risk-taking and hope that we can use the findings to help influence policy to make lives better.”

Dr. Blankenship admits that she still sometimes struggles to balance the philosophical question of local vs. global. “In working overseas, I saw the devastating impact of AIDS and other health problems. However, I have a strong resistance to making global health only a matter for low and middle-income countries. Having spent nearly five years getting to know the women in New Haven, and seeing the discrimination, abuse, and health risks they face on a daily basis, I can never forget about the inequalities present in our own country.”

She is revisiting these topics – both national and international—this fall as the instructor for an undergraduate class on Gender, Poverty, and Health. “The topic is vast, but I’ll be happy if I can succeed in getting students to look critically at how the social categories of gender and class affect people’s vulnerability to HIV, drug use, violence, and poor health,” she says. “The cultural context may be different depending on where you live, but there is no denying that relations of gender and poverty shape people’s health experience no matter where they live.”

Dr. Kim Blankenship is facilitating a monthly meeting of faculty to determine where to focus Duke’s interdisciplinary research efforts in gender, poverty and health. Faculty who are interested in learning more should contact her at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).