Director Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor Dr. Patricia Richards is Director of the Institute for Women's and Gender Studies and Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies. She is an affiliate faculty member with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute and the Institute of Native American Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Her specialty areas include the sociology of gender; Indigenous politics in Latin America; development; social movements, and qualitative methodology. Dr. Richards's first book, Pobladoras, Indígenas and the State: Conflicts Over Women's Rights in Chile, was published in 2004 by Rutgers University Press. In the book, she examines how state policy shapes the promotion of women's interests but at the same time contributes to the marginalization of particular classes and racial-ethnic groups. The book contributes to understandings of how actors who differ by gender, class, and race/ethnicity are articulated into the nation under reestablished democracies. Professor Richards's second book, Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights, was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2013. The book examines inter-cultural relations in the context of struggles over natural resources, multicultural policies, and indigenous rights in Southern Chile, documenting the ways that identity and development ideologies are reproduced and reinterpreted at the local level, and how systemic racism is articulated in the process. Her latest book, coauthored with Rebecca Hanson (University of Florida), is called Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Fieldwork. The book focuses on women ethnographers' experiences of sexual harassment while conducting field research, and examines what these experiences can tell us about the construction of ethnographic knowledge and our discipline more broadly. It was published in 2019 with the University of California Press. She holds the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professorship (2018), is the recipient of the Richard B. Russell Undergraduate Teaching Award (2008) and the Sandy Beaver Excellence in Teaching Award (2007), and a member of the UGA Teaching Academy.
