My research is in the political economy of health and work and focuses on forms of inequality. I’m interested in workers in the healthcare sector and in academia, mental health, and connections between paid work & unpaid reproductive labor.
In one project I use interview-based field research with over 70 nurses to examine the demand for paid and unpaid care work and the impacts on nurses in a public hospital in Johannesburg. The fieldwork is published in PLOS ONE and has contributed to publications in Preventive Medicine, Global Public Health, AIDS, Public Health Ethics, and Gender, Work & Organization. New research considers precariousness among nurses, feminist perspectives on autism referrals, and the impacts of Covid-19 on healthcare workers.
Related research on women economists highlights the role of women in the discipline and contributions of feminist political economy to economic thought. Feminist research on gendered and racialized work links the construction of economic knowledge with the value of women’s work more broadly, for example in nursing and direct care. My research in this area includes studies of feminism in political economy in the Review of Radical Political Economics and the American Review of Political Economy, and a history of the first women’s organization in economics published in Review of the History of Economic Thought and Methodology. Current research reviews women’s experiences in the economics discipline.
I completed my PhD in Economics at the University of Massachusetts in 2012. I am an Associate Professor of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University of Ohio and hold a joint appointment for research with Ezintsha, in the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
I recently co-founded a community for people interested in Feminist Radical Political Economy (FRPE)
Jennifer Cohen 