Women’s and Gender Studies Awards First Ph.D.s

Zenzele Isoke, the first student to complete a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers,  is deeply committed to transformative research and teaching, to the development of sophisticated understanding of Black women’s social and political activism in national and transnational contexts, and to the quest for social justice in a globalizing world. Her dissertation draws upon African American experience, Black feminist theory, and original research to challenge received views about the nature of politics.  Within political science, “politics” has been variously defined as activities within and pertaining to the official institutions of state, the “struggle for power,” mechanisms of “partisan mutual adjustment,” or the “authoritative allocation of values.”  Zenzele demonstrates that these definitions fail to encompass the practice of politics within low-income communities of color in urban environments.  Rather than accept classic claims concerning the “alienation” of the urban poor, which allegedly explain political disinterest and disaffection by constructing minorities as passive and apolitical, Zenzele documents distinctive forms of political activism within African American communities.  Through interviews and focus groups with a wide array of African American women who are politically engaged in the poorest neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, Zenzele maps grassroots activism in black-majority districts.  Focusing on the voluntary organizations of black civil society as well as on electoral politics, she illuminates dimensions of political life that have been neglected by mainstream scholars.  Moving beyond voting behavior and institutional politics, she  makes a powerful case that qualitative methods can generate forms of knowledge that continue to elude large quantitative studies. Thus, in addition to expanding contemporary understandings of political life in urban communities of color, Zenzele also makes important contributions to methodological debates, demonstrating that methods accredited by traditional social science disciplines are neither race nor gender neutral.

Zenzele’s contributions to interdisciplinary women’s studies and African American studies are equally important.  Her dissertation investigates how “blackness” as a blighted urban category has been produced in the United States.  She traces complex stratifications related to race, class, gender, and sexuality in Newark, New Jersey.  She also provides important insights into the pervasive effects of continuing racism on black urban communities, black women’s development of social networks as survival strategies in the inner city, the operations of homophobia in majority and minority communities, and the possibilities for resistance and social change in contemporary American cities.