Jussara dos Santos Raxlen

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology

Primary Academic Program: Sociology

Biography: Jussara dos Santos Raxlen’s research explores the relationship between knowledge systems (e.g., cultural, “subaltern,” hegemonic, scientific, political, and bureaucratic) and power. She is interested in the politics and ethics of various forms of knowing and ordering the world and how they may burden, complicate, or facilitate social relations across differences. Her current research focuses on the problem of how to provide long-term care for the very old in the “aging-in-place” era in the United States, examining how the state, the long-term care industry, various eldercare experts and professionals, and civil society organizations understand and address the issue. Her inter-institutional approach points to conflicting philosophies, incommensurable logics, and contradictory practices, as well as possibilities for change. She argues that, together, policy makers and civil society need to develop more empirically grounded and, thus, nuanced understandings about place/space, time, care, welfare, life, and death if we are to narrow the gap between what is a precarious present for many and a future where everyone has a chance to live and die with dignity.

Complementing this research agenda, Professor dos Santos Raxlen’s teaching interests include medical sociology, sociology of knowledge, work and occupations, the body, sex/gender/sexualities, deviance, sociological theory, feminist and queer theorizing, care/caregiving, and ethnography. In addition, based on her experiences as a theater performer and social theater practitioner in Brazil, Europe, and Lesotho, she welcomes opportunities to use socially engaged art forms as critical tools in participatory action research (PAR) projects that seek to produce collective knowledge, social analysis, and social change—inside and outside of the academy.

BA SUNY Empire State University; MMA, MPhil, PhD, The New School for Social Research. At Bard since 2022.
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Location: Fairbairn
Office: 201