Lynet Uttal

Associate Professor, Chican@ and Latin@ Studies Program
Associate Professor, Department of Human Development Family Studies
Director, Asian American Studies
Associate Professor, Women Studies

Education

• Ph.D., University of California-Santa Cruz

Specialization and Research Interests
Dr. Uttal is interested in biculturalism, Latino immigrant families, parent-childcare provider relationships, critical family studies, comparative racial ethnic family studies, and community-based research and education methods. Her current research is a community-based research project with Latino immigrant families and childcare providers in the Midwest. Using a participatory, educational and dialogic method, she and a research/education team are organizing monthly workshops with Latino immigrant families and childcare providers about various family issues and childrearing topics. Taking a preventive approach, these topics are delivered to parents with children under 8 years of age with the hope that by strengthening family relationships now, parents and their children will have better communication when the children are teens. Topics are presented for parents to critically examine the applicability of this information to their own lives and how to adapt them to make them culturally specific. Her past research has explored the relationship between families and their childcare arrangements in context of the changing postindustrial global economy and the increased participation of women in the paid labor market. She has studied the relationship between employed mothers and childcare providers in different types of childcare arrangements. She is particularly interested in how race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and class matter to these relationships. Some of the topics she has examined include: employed mother-childcare provider relationships, racial safety and cultural maintenance, use of extended family relationships for regular childcare arrangements, and how the meaning of motherhood shapes employed mothers' expectations of their childcare providers. She is also interested in contemporary family well-being, specifically how families are adapative and sharing childrearing functions between parents and childcare providers. One of her applied areas of interest is how ongoing informal parent education can be conducted when parents and childcare providers share the care of a child between them. Dr. Uttal draws upon an interdisciplinary background that combines sociology, psychology, anthropology, women's studies, and ethnic studies. She is a faculty affiliate with Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program, Asian American Studies Program, and Women’s Studies. Her methodological expertise is using indepth interviews with racially and socioeconomically diverse samples. She is also interested in theories of care giving, women of color in the United States, and biculturalism. She regularly teaches "Racial Ethnic Families in the U.S." and a graduate seminar in "Qualitative Methods" using combined feminist and ethnic studies' perspectives.

Selected Publications

• Liminal Cultural Work in Family Childcare: Latino Immigrant Family Childcare Providers and Bicultural Childrearing in the United States. Special issue: V. Pache, V. Dasen (eds), Politics and History of Childcare. From the World of Wet Nurses to the Networks of Family Childcare Providers, Paedagogica Historica 6, 2010)
• (Re)Visioning Family Ties To Communities and Contexts. In Handbook of Feminist Family Studies, edited by Sally A. Lloyd, April L. Few, and Katherine R. Allen. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009.
• The Impact of Latino Immigrants and Bicultural Program Coordinators on Organizational Philosophy and Values: A Case Study of Organizational Responsiveness. Pp. 393-410 in Strengths and Challenges of New Immigrant Families: Implications for Research, Theory, Education and Service edited by Rochelle Dalla, John DeFrain, Julie Johnson & Doug Abbott. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, Inc., 2009
• Lynet Uttal. (In press). “Organizational Cultural Competency: Shifting Programs for Latino Immigrants from a Client-Centered to a Community-Based Orientation,” American Journal of Community Psychology.
• Lynet Uttal (co-authored with Stephen Small). 2005. “Action-oriented Research: Strategies for an Engaged University," Journal of Marriage and Family 67 (November): 936-948.
• Lynet Uttal. (2002). Making Care Work: Employed Mothers in the New Childcare Market.
• Lynet Uttal & Mary Tuominen. (1999) Tenuous Relationships: Exploitation, Emotion, and Racial Ethnic Significance in Paid Childcare Work. Gender & Society 13(6): 755-777.
• Lynet Uttal. (1999) Using Kin for Child Care: Embedment in Family Socioeconomic Webs. Journal of Marriage and the Family November: 845-857.
• Lynet Uttal. (1997). "Trust Your Instincts": Cultural and class-based preferences in employed mothers' childcare choices. Qualitative Sociology 20(2): 253-274.
• Lynet Uttal. (1996) Custodial Care, Surrogate Care, Coordinated Care: The Meaning of Child Care to Employed Mothers, Gender & Society 10(3): 291-311.
• Lynet Uttal. (1996) Racial Safety and Cultural Maintenance: The Childcare Concerns of Women of Color. In Karen Hansen and Anita Garey (Eds.) 1998. Families, Kinship, & Domestic Politics (pp. 597-606). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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