Summary
Licensed in Illinois and Nevada
Dr. Ratliff studies social ecologies that exacerbate marginalization, violence, and health disparities. They are a critical, queer, place-based, person-centered, post-structuralist scholar, whose participatory research approaches with transgender young people and young people experiencing homelessness have centered young people as the experts of their own experiences. Dr. Ratliff uses qualitative and geospatial methodologies to better understand how power, policy, violence, and marginalization operate in the lives of marginalized and vulnerable young people. Dr. Ratliff’s teaching emphasizes trauma-responsive, social-ecological, person-centered perspectives in social work practice, supporting social work students in learning to observe and understand the complexities of how the social environment impacts the everyday lives of the people they serve.
Areas of interest
- Social policy impacts on marginalized youth populations
- Housing and homelessness in young adults
- Health and well being in transgender youth and young adults
- Structural violence and structural oppression
- Power and decision-making
- Geospatial Data
- Constructivist Grounded Theory
Courses taught at the University of Nevada, Reno
- SW 310: Structural Oppression
- SW 311: Theoretical Perspectives on Human Behavior
- SW 462/662: Gender and Sexuality in Social Work Practice
- SW 640: Elements of Evidence-Informed Practice
Publications
Education
- PhD, School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley, 2021
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MSW, Mental Health Concentration, Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2012Certificate: Evidence-Based Mental Health Practice with Children and Adolescents
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BA, Sociology and English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2008