I am Jacqueline ("Nina") Leshan. I am a sociologist by training. I did
my graduate work at UCSC, where I focused on cultures of resistance. I
worked with indigenous midwives along the southern border of Mexico.
Using a method called Community-Based-Research, in which the people
who are being studied participate in all aspects of the research,
including deciding what questions should be explored, how to ask
questions, and what the different kinds of answers are, I helped the
midwives design and implement methods of education and prevention of
sexually transmitted infections for their own communities. This is
important for several reasons: while rural Chiapas, Mexico is an area
of low incidence of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, men
often travel to cities and to the United States for work because their
land and livelihood is being swallowed up in the neo-liberal reforms
enforced upon Mexico by the global economic system and the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund. I use Community-Based Research Method
in all of my work because I strongly believe that people always are
able to understand best the meanings, strengths and problems of their
own lives. But although people almost always understand their
immediate conditions, they often lack the analytical tools to
understand how the immediate conditions of personal lives are embedded
within larger national and global dynamics that emerge and change over
time. Engaging in Community-Based Research Projects provides a means
for learning this, as well as fomenting self-determination. I learned
a tremendous amount when I traveled to remote indigenous towns helping
indigenous doctors and midwives bring much needed medical care to
under-served communities. I went to Chiapas to work with midwives
because I am also a midwife. For many years I cared for undocumented
Mexican and Central American women who, like so many of our ancestors,
journey to the United States in search of a better life for their
children. I wondered about the conditions which compel people to tear
up roots to face an often hostile environment in the U.S. I was
especially concerned about the effects of the North American Free
Trade Agreement on the farmers of Mexico, and I wanted to see how they
families were surviving within these global economic conditions. I
also worked with Maquiladora ( first world owned factories that locate
in third world countries to avoid environmental protection and labor
laws and pay slave wages to desperate people) Workers to organize
unions to better their working conditions and their lives. I needed to
understand then, how these global forces are lived locally, in the
homes and communities of rural indigenous people.

In an attempt to engage sociology in action to make a better world,
and to create projects with the people. I worked on a project to
bring point of use water filtration systems to communities with little
access to potable water. The World Health Organization estimates that
11.1 billion people (one in six) are living without clean water. I am
just at the initiation of this project which will take place in
Mexico, but will also bring interventions into science classes in the
formal academy. I hope to encourage scientists to understand the link
between science and society and to foment science that is directed to
meeting real human needs. You can read more about the project at
scienceforthepeople.net.
I am also CELTA certified in teaching English as a second language.