Education
B.A. & M.A. in Economics-Prague School of Economics, M.A. in Applied Linguistics/TESOL-University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Ph.D. in Social Psychology-Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Biosketch
Jana Sladkova is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Jana has researched migration experiences and is beginning to explore mindful diversity facilitation. She is working on several projects. The first one concentrates on female immigrants in the city of Lowell, all of whom are day care providers with the ACRE Family Child Care. She and her colleagues are collecting the women’s narratives in order to understand their successes and difficulties during their process of migration. The goal is to develop a blueprint for similar projects that enable immigrant women to contribute to the U.S. economy as they successfully integrate.
Jana’s second project spans the United States and Honduras. She is working with an interdisciplinary team, mainly the Mesoamerican Development Institute. Our partner, Cooperative COMISUYL, and the processing and export facility are managed by women and is the first coffee cooperative in Latin America on track to receive the UN-backed Gender Equity Seal (GES) for its participation of women in management and hand-on experiential training program of rural youth. The intent of GES is to provide a standard, whose goal is to enable an organization to benefit from the talents and skills of a fully participatory workforce. Since GES contains clear indicators of success, one of our research goals is to evaluate its implementation and maintenance over five years through an evidence-based mostly quantitative process. Working with our partner cooperative will enable us to examine the impacts of rural industrial processing and export using clean energy and state-of-the-art technology; direct international trade; and the role of women in management and operations positions on the cooperative and many rural communities it serves. We will use the lenses and research design driven by standpoint theory and narrative inquiry and accomplish this by collecting extensive qualitative data, we which subject to systematic narrative analysis. Sharing narratives is also empowering for research participants as the process helps individuals to understand their strengths and resilience and to build a community to their liking.
Her newest project concentrates on students of color at the university and their experiences of racism. She is planning a research project that will utilize photo voice as well as daily diaries that will enable students visually and verbally track their daily experiences.
Faculty Bio