Roschelle, Anne R.

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ROSCHELLE, Anne R.

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Sociology Department, State University of New York at New Paltz, 75 South Manheim Blvd., New Paltz, NY 12561.

CAREER: State University of New York, New Paltz, associate professor and chair of sociology department; University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, faculty associate. Certified mediator, State of New York.

MEMBER: American Sociology Association (Jessie Bernard Award selection committee member, 2003-2004).

AWARDS, HONORS: Outstanding Academic Book Award, Choice, 1997, for No More Kin: Exploring Race, Class, and Gender in Family Networks.

WRITINGS:

No More Kin: Exploring Race, Class, and Gender inFamily Networks, Sage (Thousand Oaks, CA), 1997.

Contributor to books, including The Tattered Web of Kinship, In the New Politics of Race, Shaping the Future City through Gentrification and Social Exclusion, and In Urban Fortunes. Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of Developing Societies and Peace Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A book about homeless families in San Francisco.

SIDELIGHTS: Anne R. Roschelle is a sociologist with a strong interest in the interplay between family and poverty. In No More Kin: Exploring Race, Class, and Gender in Family Networks, Roschelle "investigates racial, ethnic and gender difference in the participation of extended family support networks in family life," explained Sociology contributor Tracey Reynolds. "The study is motivated by debates on poverty and welfare reform, explicitly racialized in America." Traditionally, lower-income communities have relied on family networks to supplement, or substitute for, welfare assistance, but Roschelle finds that this safety net has become terribly frayed over the years. Instead, she shows that "the complex co-residential household structures that preconditioned so much informal assistance among minority families in the past have become far less prevalent, dwindling as a ready basis for family support," according to Dennis P. Hogan in Contemporary Sociology.

Roschelle contends that economic structures not only impoverish many minority families, but are often actively hostile to the kind of informal networks that might lessen some of the effects of poverty. As a result, the family networks that made poverty bearable two decades ago may no longer exist. "The author makes this powerful point by meticulously examining cultural and structural determinants of participation in social support networks among different ethno-racial groups and through the lens of an analytic framework that incorporates race, class, and gender as systems of oppression," noted Cecilia Menjivar in the Journal of Marriage and the Family. Menjivar concluded that No More Kin "is a fine study with important theoretical and policy implications."