Recent Grant Awardees

2009 Grant and Fellowship Awardees

Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship

Jennifer Erickson, graduate student, anthropology, $10,000, Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship, “Gendered Citizenship and the State in a Neoliberal Era: Refugees and Social Service Organizations in Fargo, North Dakota.”  Her dissertation uses social service organizations as a lens for examining broader ideas about social citizenship in a neoliberal era in the United States. By comparing Bosnian and Southern Sudanese refugees and their experiences with public and private social service organizations in Fargo, North Dakota, her research aims to better understand the quotidian ways in which gender, race, class, and culture shape ideas about citizenship and the state.

Jennifer Erickson

Graduate Student Research Grant Awards

Shannon Bell, graduate student, sociology, $2500, CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant,  “Mobilizing for Environmental Justice in the West Virginia Coalfields: Uncovering the Process of Cognitive Liberation through the Feminist Methodology of Photovoice.”  For my doctoral research, I am studying the social and environmental impacts of the coal industry on central Appalachia and the grassroots environmental justice movement that has risen up to hold the coal industry accountable for irresponsible mining practices. As a part of my field research, I used the feminist methodology of “Photovoice” with 40 women living in five coal-mining communities in southern West Virginia in order to study possible mechanisms for overcoming the challenges to grassroots mobilization in Central Appalachia. In this eight-month project, I gave participants digital cameras and asked them to take pictures to “tell the story” of their communities, including both positive and negative aspects of life in the region. The five groups met once every three weeks to discuss the photographs, identify common community concerns, and communicate those concerns to legislators and the public through local and regional exhibits.

Lia Frederiksen, graduate student, international studies and geography, $2450, Graduate Student Research Grant, “Bodies, Geography and Globalization: Social Reproduction in Post-Apartheid Cape Town, South Africa.” In my thesis, I investigate the continuities and disjunctures between urban geography, economic development, and women’s everyday lives through the lens of social reproduction—the ‘life’s work’ of reproducing and maintaining life itself through the relationships of care and responsibility that are shaped by the global and in turn influence the local and national. The apartheid city was characterized by significant geographical and social separation, which had profound impacts on the ability of women to contribute to daily and intergenerational household subsistence. In the post-apartheid transition, Cape Town boasts the highest rates of service delivery in South Africa, but the geography of access to services and the city’s spaces is highly uneven.  I plan to speak with women in Cape Town to understand how the geography of the city interacts with their daily lives and experience of the city space.

Ryanne Pilgeram, graduate student, sociology, $2500, Graduate Student Research Grant, “Sustainable for Whom? Implications of Sustainable Agriculture on Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation.” Using participant observation at a local farmer’s market I investigate the gender, class, and race politics of sustainable agriculture. This project turns a feminist lens on sustainable agriculture by examining the ideologies that are involved in both the consumption and production at a farmer’s market. By exploring how a vision of sustainable agriculture is constructed this project interrogates the sometimes complicated ideologies that are at the heart of the environmental movement.

Aditi Sinha, graduate student, international studies, $1250, Graduate Student Research Grant, “Women’s Voices in Assessing the Impact of a Microcredit Program: A Case Study of SHARE Microfin (SML) in India.”  MFIs often use practitioner-led impact assessment exercises, however, most practitioner-led impact assessments tend to be donor driven and focus excessively on the operations of credit led institutions.  My research objective is to bridge the gap between formal assessment methods by tracing changes in women’s lives since their credit group membership. I will focus on women’s participation in a ‘bottom up’ development approach that concentrates on the needs of women who help define the goals of the development project. Giving women a voice in impact assessment methods is an alternative means to understand the impact of microcredit programs instead of focusing solely on the quantitative calculation of program outcomes.

Bryna Tuft, graduate student, East Asian languages and literatures, $2261, “Literary Bodies and Private Selves in the Works of the Chinese Avant-Garde Women Writers.” In the period of economic expansion and increasing openness to personal expression and individuality following Deng Xiaoping’s “Open Door” reforms, the avant-garde women writers engaged in a project of resistance to the traditionally appropriated use of the female body, image, and voice. This resistance can be seen in the ways they consciously construct a private space in their fiction by presenting alternate forms of female sexuality (in contrast to the heterosexual wife and mother) and by adding details of their own personal histories in their writing. Critics of this literature often oversimplify it, attacking it as being self-exploitative and trivial, while feminist supporters often take an over-naturalized view of the descriptions of female sexuality.  While I am certainly motivated by the feminist project of the relocation and revitalization of women’s writing, in this study I will focus on the somewhat more complex issues of privacy in these women’s works, and in this way respond to both critics and advocates of these women’s writings.

Faculty Research Grant Awards

Yvonne Braun, assistant professor, sociology, $2500, Faculty Research Grant, “Water for Money: Gender, Development, and Globalization in Lesotho, Southern Africa.” (Info to come.)

Alisa Freedman, assistant professor, Japanese literature and film, $3910, Faculty Research Grant, “Changing Images of Working Women on Japanese Television Dramas.” Since the early 1990s, Japanese prime-time serials have almost always depicted workingwomen. More than being mere entertainment, these fictional narratives educate viewers about real social issues and dramatize media discourses. Because of the characters and the ways their stories are told, these dramas impact the lives of female viewers. Television attracts a large and diverse audience at home and abroad, and therefore it is a good way to view social values, assess Japan’s global image, and see how popular culture shapes gender norms.

With the help of a CSWS research grant, I traveled to Tokyo to research the general conception of the book and collect materials for three specific chapters, to watch drama series from the 1950s to the present to discern patterns and conventions, and to learn more about the Japanese television industry. I also wrote an article about current portrayals of career women near forty years of age, the so-called “Ara-fo” demographic that has been viewed as a measure of individuals’ happiness, a top sociopolitical issue. Her project contributes to the growing fields of global television and Japanese gender studies and promotes understanding of the roles of women in the Japanese workforce and the family.

Gina Herrmann, associate professor, Romance languages, $8460, Faculty Research Grant, “Voices of the Vanquished: Spanish Republican Women in War and Prison.” Herrmann investigates how experiences of war and imprisonment get translated into individual and collective expressions of political subjectivity. This study is based on an extensive oral history project carried out with some 40 Spanish women who belonged to communist, anarchist, or socialist organizations during the Spanish Civil War 1936-39. Once the Republic fell to the Nationalists, most of these women faced summary trials, long terms of imprisonment and in some cases, the forced disappearances of their children and husbands. After analyzing modes of narrative subjectivity in the oral histories she conducted, the book turns to the various cinematic and novelistic recyclings of testimonial interviews with this population of militant women.

Jocelyn Hollander, associate professor, sociology, $6000, Faculty Research Grant, “Can a Short Self-Defense Workshop Reduce Sexual Assault Among College Women?”  Rates of sexual assault are shockingly high among college-aged women. Over the past 20 years, universities have attempted a variety of strategies to reduce sexual assault, such as improved environmental features (lighting, call boxes) and rape prevention workshops. Unfortunately, these efforts have met with little success. Self-defense training is a promising but little-studied approach to sexual assault prevention. This project will examine whether a short, intensive self-defense workshop can reduce the rate of sexual assault among college freshmen.

Daniel HoSang, assistant professor, ethnic studies and political science, $2500, Faculty Research Grant, “Reproductive Justice at the Ballot: Origins, Trends and Future Developments.”  This project examines the increasing use of ballot propositions to debate, frame, and set public policy for a broad range of “reproductive justice” issues, seeking to broadly answer three main questions: (1) What political conditions and developments tend to produce these measures? (2) How have political actors framed their public messages in response to the proliferation of these measures? (3) How have these measures affected the ways that these policy issues are debated and adopted after the election? His ultimate goal for this project is to seek to understand and explain how the use of ballot measures is likely to shape the political terrain for reproductive justice policies at the state and national levels.

Michelle McKinley, assistant professor, law, $2500, “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism and Ecclesiastical Courts, 1589-1700.”  I will use my CSWS award to travel to Lima, Peru, to conduct archival research for my manuscript, “Fractional Freedoms.” This project uses the lens of legal history, and legal anthropology to examine litigation undertaken by Peruvian slaves in 17th century ecclesiastical courts.  While I did not want to romanticize the experience of enslaved families, I was struck by the use of legal avenues to pursue family integrity that appear so frequently in Latin American ecclesiastical courts in comparison with their virtual absence in United States courts. I wanted to add these valiant efforts of slave couples to the canon of knowledge about the slave family, and look at the broader role of courts in slave litigation.

“Fractional Freedoms” situates enslaved women as legal agents who simultaneously occupied multiple identities as mistresses, workers, wives, mothers, wet-nurses, and domestics that conditioned their experience of slavery.  Despite the variable outcomes of their lawsuits, Michelle explores how enslaved women used channels of affection and sexuality to access freedom and prevent the generational transmission of enslavement to their children. Although attentive to the overarching oppressive structures of slavery, the book reveals instances in the lives of enslaved women when they acted as subjects other than human property. A retrospective look at these proceedings tells us how litigants strategically exploited the rhetorical power of liberty within the ecclesiastical courts and navigated between slavery and marriage in pursuing fractions of freedom.

Jane Mendle, assistant professor, psychology, $2500, “Coping Responses to Date Rape: Attachment, Behavior, and Cognition.”  The process of coping with rape occurs within a complex cognitive nexus, influenced by social perspectives and social needs, designed to minimize inevitable feelings of grief, shock, and betrayal.  This project investigates how women respond to and interpret the experience of date rape.  Psychological research into rape has dropped precipitously in the past 20 years, and the aims of this project are designed to clarify how therapy can be more effectively tailored to help women assimilate traumatic experiences.

Deborah Olson, assistant professor, special education, $2497, Faculty Research Grant, “Understanding disabled women’s experiences with abuse: Recasting identities while conducting collaborative anticipatory research.”  This project will complement research presently being conducted by the Trauma Healing Project, which is examining how survivors experience trauma in order to understand the mechanisms of healing and to promote healing practices to service providers and the community. The research will be expanded to include women with disabilities who are also survivors of trauma.  THP uses a participatory action research model that centers the experience of survivors of trauma within all phases of research. The process and results of this project will inform disability identify theory as survivors reformulate their identity not only as women with disabilities and survivors of trauma, but also as researchers and authorities on trauma as experienced by people with disabilities.

Tania Triana, assistant professor, Romance languages, $2500, Faculty Research Grant, “Erasing the Memory of Slavery through the Afro-Cuban Female Body—chapter two of the book manuscript “Blackness Unmoored: Cuban Narratives of Racialization.” This project examines the early nineteenth-century writings of Cuban white Creole intellectuals Francisco Arango y Parreño and José Antonio Saco to understand how their positions for and against the expansion of the slave trade focused on whitening African slaves and their descendants on the island to prevent insurrection. I argue that in these writings the womb of the Afro-Cuban woman becomes the symbolic axis of the emergent nation’s security and development as she is made to do the material and ideological labor necessary for the production of Cuban national whiteness. Key to these creole intellectuals’ project of socialization was whitening through the regulated intermarriage of African slave women with white European or creole men, and in some cases the granting of limited privileges to male mixed-race progeny from these arranged interracial marriages. While their appeals to the Spanish colonial state were never implemented, they are significant in that they represent how black bodies—and specifically the bodies of black women—were key to the white creole elite’s construction of Cuban whiteness.

Priscilla Yamin, assistant professor, political science, $6000, “Nuptial Nation: Marriage Politics in the US.”   This project examines how marriage plays a central governing role in the American state by shaping both the cultural meaning and concrete terms of citizenship. While marriage and family has long been a subject for feminist theory and gender studies, each is rarely an object of study in political science. I bridge this divide by analyzing marriage as a political institution similar to other formal political institutions such as Congress or presidency and explores how marriage, family and gender are tied to the exercise of political power. I argue that American political dynamics cannot be fully grasped absent an understanding of the central role played by marriage.