FACULTY

Riché J. Daniel Barnes
Instructor

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Office: Tyler Annex 204

Phone: 585-4873

Riché J. Daniel Barnes is completing her dissertation in the department of anthropology at Emory University where she is a non-resident graduate fellow in the Sloan Foundation Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life. She holds an M.A. in anthropology from Emory University, an M.S. in urban studies from Georgia State University, and a B.A. in political science from Spelman College.

Ms. Barnes specializes in race, class, and gender dynamics in African American families as they are experienced in the U.S. political economy. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic exploratory study of professional middle class mothers and their families in Atlanta, where she illuminates the intersectional experiences of African American professional middle class married mothers who daily negotiate middle class identity, gender formation and strategy, and their invisibility in scholarship and policies pertaining to marriage, family and work.

Her most recent publication is a chapter in the volume The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American Middle Class (2008) where she refutes commonly held iterations of work and family conflict. While teaching at Spelman College, Ms. Barnes explored cultural shifts in Ghana and Uganda as women join the workforce in increasing numbers. This research was part of a collaborative research group funded by the National Science Foundation. Though the funding period has ended, she intends to continue these inquiries in her future research, broadening her focus on gender, motherhood, work and family to women in Africa and the African diaspora.

Ms. Barnes has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Ford Foundation Dissertation Award (2004) and the Marjorie Shostak Prize in Humanistic Ethnographic Writing for an excerpt from her dissertation (2007).

Since joining the faculty, she has taught Introduction to Black Culture, Black Feminist Theory, Anthropology of the African Diaspora, Culture and Class in Afro-American Families and looks forward to adding Afro-American Autobiography and Black Women, Work and Family to her course offerings.