User:Celestewatkinshayes

Short Biography  Occupation: Associate Vice President for Research; Professor of Sociology and African American Studies  Education (schools attended): Spelman College, B.A. & Harvard University, M.A. and Ph.D.  Organization (affiliations): Northwestern University; Spelman College; Detroit Institute of Arts  Website: http://celestewatkinshayes.com/

Academic Biography (i.e., education, degrees, titles)

Celeste Watkins-Hayes is Associate Vice President (AVP) for Research and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. In her AVP role, Watkins-Hayes oversees several university research centers and institutes working in the social sciences and humanities. She also recently created the ASCEND program, an initiative designed to support high-achieving senior faculty members as they pursue their strategic priorities. Watkins-Hayes is a former chair of the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern. She also served on the board of trustees at Spelman College for over a decade, where she assumed various leadership roles and led the search to identify the college’s 10th president. Watkins-Hayes currently sits on the board of directors of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Watkins-Hayes is a nationally-recognized scholar and expert on urban poverty, social policy, and inequality. A faculty fellow at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research (IPR) and Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health, Watkins-Hayes holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Harvard University and a B.A. from Spelman College, where she graduated summa cum laude. Her book, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, analyzes the transformation of the AIDS epidemic and is based on interviews with over 100 female AIDS activists, policy officials, advocates, and women living with HIV/AIDS who have been on the front lines of this fight. In addition to her academic articles and essays, Watkins-Hayes has published pieces in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Chicago Magazine.

Dr. Watkins-Hayes’ intellectual commitments are motivated by a desire to offer analyses and prescriptions, based on empirically- and conceptually-rich research, that address the real-world issues that limit human potential. Her scholarship therefore speaks directly to current policy debates.

Research

Watkins-Hayes’ research focuses on urban poverty; social policy; HIV/AIDS; non-profit and government organizations; and race, class, and gender. Her first book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2009), is an ethnographic analysis of the implementation of welfare reform on the front lines of service delivery. It investigates how the professional, racial, class, and community identities of welfare caseworkers and supervisors shape the implementation of policy and other organizational dynamics. Study findings indicate that while welfare reform changed the job descriptions of front-line staff members (from eligibility-compliance claims processors to welfare-to-work caseworkers), these agencies were largely unable to undertake the steps necessary to change employees’ professional identities.

As a result, welfare reform did not unfold as many policy makers had imagined it, and a piecemeal system of service-delivery is now underway. While we have witnessed caseload reductions and increased work among low-income mothers, inequalities abound in how clients receive the services most likely to influence their abilities to sustain economic self-sufficiency. This incomplete revolution has also solidified many of the long-standing tensions around race, class, and community belonging in these offices in ways that have direct and indirect effects on service-delivery and other organizational dynamics. Dr. Watkins-Hayes is currently Principal Investigator of the Health, Hardship, and Renewal Study, which explores the economic and social survival strategies of a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse group of women living with HIV/AIDS in the Chicago area. Watkins-Hayes received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Investigator Award and a National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award to conduct this research. Her second book, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, was published by the University of California Press (August 2019). Dr. Watkins-Hayes has been profiled in ESSENCE magazine, USA Today Weekend magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She has been widely quoted in the popular press as a national expert on social inequality; HIV/AIDS; and race, class, and gender.

Honors

In 2018, Watkins-Hayes received the E. LeRoy Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching, which is the highest teaching award given by Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her first book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2009), was a Finalist for the 2009 C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2011 Max Weber Book Award from the American Sociological Association. Watkins-Hayes received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Investigator Award and a National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award to conduct research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

References 2019 Watkins-Hayes, Celeste. Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality. University of California Press.

2009 Watkins-Hayes, Celeste. The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

2015 Watkins-Hayes, Celeste. “The Pick and the Process: Leading a Presidential Search in the Digital Age.” Cover Story - Trusteeship Magazine. Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities.