Research

My research focuses on three concepts and their intersections:

family and gender,

culture and politics, and

methodology.

In my current ongoing project,

I examine the relationship between parenthood in politics.

In one article, I use quantitative data from the NLSY 1997 to demonstrate that our understanding of motherhood’s impact on voting rates is incorrect, as it is built on a false assumption about motherhood as a nonrandom event.

In a methodologically-focused article, I present a set of criteria by which we can evaluate drawings as data on relationships, using motherhood and women’s relationships to the government as examples. In this chapter, I use the qualitative data I collected in my study, which involved four waves of interviews and over fifteen waves of surveys with 84 women in Wisconsin between 2019 and 2022.

I also draw on this data for a third article, in which I argue for a new understanding of categories of motherhood as including pre-birth or pre-adoption motherhood.