FOCUS
By highlighting the health care disparities faced by African American families that have children with autism, Stephanie looks to identify ways to change the landscape to provide more equitable care. To achieve this, Stephanie studies the everyday lives of these families, centering the parent’s narratives as experts in their own lived experience. She also spends time observing clinicians in the medical spaces where these families receive the diagnosis of autism and related disabilities. It is Stephanie’s goal to create a corpus of data that represents the experiences of African American parents that have children with autism or other related disabilities to design health care policies that will provide equitable access to much needed health care and services.
MORE ABOUT STEPHANIE
Stephanie Keeney Parks is a doctoral student at UCLA in the Department of Anthropology where she focuses on medical and linguistic anthropology. Stephanie is also the recipient of the prestigious Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship at UCLA. She received her Master’s degree in Medical Anthropology from Creighton University in Omaha Nebraska in 2017. Stephanie is a wife and the mother of two children; her oldest child is diagnosed with autism.
