Lead exposure and poisoning from toxic paint remains endemic in low-income U.S. neighborhoods and threatens children’s health. Perhaps unsurprisingly, caregiving for lead exposure often falls on mothers. To broaden understanding of this gendered form of environmental injustice, the SAGES Program will host a talk with Matthew H. McLeskey, assistant professor of criminal justice and an affiliate faculty member in the Sustainability Studies Program at the State University of New York at Oswego.
McLeskey will present “Merging the Humanities and Social Sciences: Using Oral Life History Methods to Understand Women’s Lived Experience with Lead Exposure” Thursday, April 18, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in Clark Hall, Room 206.
McLeskey’s research draws upon 35 open-ended interviews with low-income mothers to understand how lead exposure impacts families already struggling with economic precarity and limited healthcare access. Interestingly, in the rare instances that respondents agreed to participate in this research, formal interviews did not elicit their full experiences with toxic risks in their homes and neighborhoods.
Only after transitioning to a human-centric approach that allowed “mothers” rather than “respondents” to tell the story of life in their home, neighborhood, and city that the full texture of their lives in a “leaded landscape” fully emerged. McLeskey argues that an oral life history methodology approach allows for a more fully realized humanistic social science that highlights the lived experience of research participants more than the perspective of the researcher.