Ronelle Williams

Ronelle Williams

Graduate Student, Occupational Therapy

Ronelle Williams is interested in the psychosocial and environmental factors contributing to the origins and prevalence of disordered eating patterns in Black adolescents and women through ethnographic, autoethnographic, and empirical study methods. Her proposed research investigates how oversimplifying Black women’s high obesity rates impacts the erasure of Black girls and women’s experiences with disordered eating, the interaction between impossible European beauty standards and tropes of Black women’s “slim-thick” figures on body image dissatisfaction, the nuances culture and race add to the relationships between body and food, and the association between disordered eating patterns and Black girls and women vulnerability to trauma, stress, and sexual abuse due to compounding marginalized identities.