Dr. William Conwill, Assistant Professor
1215 Norman Hall
POB 117046
Gainesville, FL 32611-7046
Phone - 352-273-4327
Fax - 352-846-2697
Email - wconwill@ufl.edu
Background
Dr. Conwill is a native of Louisville, KY. He attended a prep high school in Cincinnati, OH, and spent his college years in Monroe, MI, Cincinnati, and San Diego, CA, finishing with a degree in Philosophy. His graduate training included a three-year stint at California State University, San Jose (MA-Experimental Psychology), and a seven-year stretch at Stanford University (Ph.D.-Counseling Psychology). He was a Counseling Psychologist II at the University of California, Santa Cruz during the 1970s. After directing mental health community services in the San Francisco Bay area during the first Reagan Administration, he returned to Louisville, KY during the 1980s to practice in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department at Hospital Humana-University. There, he directed the Chronic Pain Clinic. Moving to Knoxville, TN during the 1990s, he served as Chief Psychologist for the Children & Youth Division of Lakeshore Mental Health Institute, one of the three major Tennessee State hospitals for the mentally ill. From 1999-2004, he taught Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee.
Areas of Interest and Inquiry
My research focus is on the intersectionality of gender, race, and class in Mental Health policy, training, program planning and development, implementation, and evaluation. Much of the literature on cultural diversity, or other forms of diversity, pay little, if any regard to the particular needs of women. Similarly, until recent times, much of the feminist literature was limited by a failure to recognize the diverse experiences of women. In the context of education, and in many other contexts, an examination of the nexus of such categories with that of gender is crucial. In academic literature, this nexus is sometimes referred to as intersectionality. My independent scholarly work with intersectionality as a tool tends to be more theoretical at this stage. The intersectionality paradigm articulates the workings of various structured systems of inequality in the production of racialized and sexualized stereotypes and images, subjectivity, intentionality, intersubjectivity, positionality, psychic privilege, rankings in the social order, contradictory social categories, and struggles against hegemonic constraints.
I have always had an over-arching interest in the Black Family in America, stemming from my years in graduate school, and as reflected in some of the courses I have introduced over the years: Black Family Structure and Mental Health; The Black Family in American Society; The Black Child: Psychosocial Perspectives; The Black Family: Psychological Perspectives; Domestic Violence in the Black Community: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Class; and Black Family Intervention. About five years ago, I began to articulate the need for a critical intersectional as well as social contextual analysis of domestic violence in the lower-class Black community at a number of state, regional, national, and international conferences. Domestic violence in the Black community is an excellent and substantive issue for studying the parameters of the intersectionality paradigm. I have been developing a metadisciplinary ecological model of the intersectionality of gender, race, and class to inform the domestic violence curriculum of the next generation of policy makers, legal scholars, and health care professionals. A synopsis of this project can be found online as a SACES 2003 IDEA Exchange Handout at http://www.ulm.edu/~mft/download.html#anchor1778005.
Besides taking a metadisciplinary perspective, I also believe in using multi-method approaches when appropriate. For example, I have introduced intersectionality theory into the proceedings of chiefly empirical conferences, such as the International Society for Prevention Research, to increase awareness of the impact of disparities in transnational economic trade on Mexican migrant families in Tennessee. I have also brought quantitative analysis into the International Congresses of the Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, a mainly qualitative setting, in a presentation entitled “Neoliberal Policy and Domestic Violence,” in Florence, Italy. This latter work extended my analysis of the intersectionality of gender, race, and class in domestic violence—and its implications in the health services, legal, and public policy arenas—through a deeper focus on an analysis of class violence against the poor as a violation of human rights.
Practice
I have worked with my students to apply intersectionality theory to examine a number of issues, including Black, Hispanic, Islamic, and Appalachian women’s mental health. I also see the school as a legitimate community setting for counselors, and I am an advocate for cross-training. One of my objectives is to apply the Mental Health Counselor’s skills in the educational setting, where gender, race, and class systems run rife. For example, I directed one of my former students in a comparative study of traditional and full-service schools in Knoxville, Tennessee. Local developments in the full-service schools initiative have provided me with the opportunity to study the family-school interface, and the kinds of problems that children from poor children bring to school. I have described some of these developments in an article “Consultation and Collaboration: An action Research Model for the Full-Service School” you can find at http://content.apa.org/journals/cpb/55/4/239.pdf.
Training
I am also interested in investigating intersectionality in the classroom. There is a rapidly growing literature on the introduction of pedagogy for empowerment and diversity in the classroom. Because gender, race, and class have such a strong influence on individuals and the learning context, a theoretical framework that includes and permits the consideration of these factors may provide a way for researchers and teachers to connect individual and contextual factors when studying their effects on learning. The intersectionality paradigm can manage such an agenda. In nonformal and informal settings, gender, race, and class influence the development of subjectivity, or a sense of how one experiences agency. This subjectivity, in turn, affects ability and decisions to participate in learning. It also affects teachers’ choice of pedagogy and curriculum. Recognition of these issues surrounding the dynamics of gender, race, and class in adult learning, and the acknowledgment of the worth and dignity of the advancement of knowledge and the free pursuit of learning in all their students is in accordance with the American Association of University Professors’ Statement on Professional Ethics.
Over the past several years, I have taught in classrooms with sometimes up to 90-95% conservative White female counselor trainees. Students need at least a minimal level of insight and self-criticism to work cross-culturally in multicultural settings, and it is my job, as a Counseling professor, to use an effective pedagogy to train them to work across gender, race, class, and other lines familiar to those in multicultural counseling. Many students are uncomfortable with the notion they will have to work with clients who differ socially from them. As a Black male professor, I often find myself using their resistance (“He has no right to make us uncomfortable”) to demonstrate the problems their recourse to demands for gender, race, and class privilege can cause in counseling. I once introduced these notions at a roundtable discussion at a national Research on Women in Education conference. The Black women professors at my roundtable assured me that they too encountered similar phenomena of resistance and dis-ease in their classrooms, and encouraged me to continue studying these issues.
Examining these problems and solving them are imperatives, according to Constantine’s (2002) article in the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, “The Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Social Class in Counseling,” and Kenny’s (2003) “Male Teacher, Female Students: A Novice Teacher Reflects” in Nurse Education Today. The response to my presence as a Black male professor—an “outsider within”—in a predominantly White university in the South’s “Bible Belt” reflects the sociocultural dynamics, the complexity of racialized gender dynamics, the need for openness to multiple perspectives and teaching styles, the ethical challenges of implementing empowerment through pedagogy, and the search for alternatives to culturally constructed and constricting roles.
Other areas of interest include the experiences of African American college students on predominately White university campuses (see under S. Thomas, Nursing Report, p. 19 in http://nightingale.con.utk.edu/development/NursingReport.pdf), the New Partnership for Africa’s Development’s (see this organization’s website at http://www.nepad.org/2005/files/inbrief.php) plans for an international school for teens of the African Diaspora, under the coordination of Papa Ali Ndaw, NYC representative for the President of Senegal.
