Fumilayo Showers

Principal Investigator and Lab Director

Sociology

Dr. Fumilayo Showers is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research centers on race, gender, and US immigration; the social organization of health and long-term care; health professions (nursing and medicine); care work; and immigrant workers. Her work has been published in Sociological Forum, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science and Medicine: Qualitative Research in Health, and other venues.

Her book, Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in US Health Care, is the first book to document the experiences of recent West African immigrants in a range of health care occupations in the US (nursing, disability support, elder care). The book elucidates how West African immigrants use family, friendship, and other social networks, to enter the health industry as workers, and how they build health care businesses that cater to vulnerable and underserved communities, in the face of racial/ethnic discrimination and blocked opportunities encountered in the health industry and other sectors of the U.S economy.

Current research projects undertaken by Showers and members of the HealthCare lab focus on tracing changes to US health care systems and the experiences of frontline health care workers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; the study and practice of biomedicine in non-western contexts; and the global migration of health professionals. These projects have been supported by Fellowships from the Carnegie African Diaspora Studies Fellowship Program sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the UConn Humanities Institute, UConn Scholarship Facilitation Fund and Africana Studies Research Grants.

Showers completed her PhD and Master’s in sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA.