Fellow’s Talk: Sarah Boateng on Black Women’s Agency in Maternal Healthcare

Making Oneself Heard: Black Women’s Communicative Agency in Racialized Maternal Healthcare in the U.S.

Sarah Nuamah Boateng (Ph.D. candidate, Communication, UConn)

with a response by Eleni Coundouriotis (English & Comparative Literary Studies, UConn)

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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Maternal health disparities disproportionately impact women of color, particularly Black women. Existing research documents the mistreatment of Black women in clinical settings, which often marginalizes their voices and underscores the necessity for agency. This dissertation investigates the lived experiences of Black women to understand how agency is enacted through communication in perinatal care contexts within clinical settings across the United States.

Employing a qualitative methodology and a critical perspective, this dissertation introduces a communicative agentic framework to analyze how Black women in the United States navigate perinatal healthcare interactions within a racialized medical system. The research positions communication as a central site for agency, resistance, and meaning-making, providing insights to improve patient–provider relationships and advance equitable maternal healthcare.

Sarah Nuamah Boateng is a final-year doctoral student in Communication at the University of Connecticut whose research focuses on health communication, specifically women’s reproductive health and rights in interpersonal and organizational contexts. As a qualitative communication researcher, she investigates communication dynamics at the intersections of gender, structural inequities, and cultural contexts, particularly within maternal healthcare interactions involving women of color. Her work aims to elucidate how these dynamics contribute to health disparities and has also addressed communication challenges faced by women living with chronic illness. Her research has been published in leading journals, including Social Science & Medicine and the Journal of Health Communication, and has received recognition from the Christine N. Witzel Award Fund and the UConn 100 Years of Women Scholarship. She is committed to advancing quality and equitable healthcare for women of all racial and demographic backgrounds.

Eleni Coundouriotis is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on the narration and documentation of war, humanitarianism, statelessness, and the history of anticolonial struggle. She is the author of Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel (1999), The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony (2014) and Narrating Human Rights in Africa (2021).

Access note

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