by Jenée Wilde, Senior Instructor, Department of English
“One of the things that became clear during the pandemic is that graduate students were the most affected by lockdowns, but the institution made the least room for addressing how they were affected,” says CSWS Director Sangita Gopal. “Faculty could take a break from research, but graduate students didn’t have that leisure.”
As interim director last year, Gopal began taking steps for the Center to increase support for graduate students now and into the future because, she says, “There has not been a concerted effort to address their needs at the University level.”
Student-led Research Interest Groups (RIGs)
Since the 1990s, CSWS has offered grant funding to faculty and graduate students to organize interdisciplinary RIGs and working groups that explore and examine the complex nature of gender identities and inequalities. These groups provide participants with opportunities to discuss emerging and established feminist research, invite scholars to campus, and share their own projects, among other potential outcomes.
While in recent years the center has not actively pursued RIG development, “We tried to solicit new student-led RIGs this year as a way to increase support for graduate student research,” Gopal says. “RIGs are good for getting new research projects off the ground because students often are at the cutting edge of research more than faculty.”
Every Spring, graduate students and faculty members are invited to an Information Session on the purpose and history of RIGs, Special Projects, and Initiatives and how to apply for grant funds. “Our efforts this year were richly rewarded with three new student-led RIGs that think outside of the box and engage other intersectional areas of scholarship such as performance,” Gopal says.
According to application materials, the Trans Studies RIG “creates a space for trans and other gender expansive scholars to deepen their understanding of trans embodiment and trans studies, form community across disciplines, and foster collective care with a larger trans and gender-expansive community.” Goals for the year include regular meetings to discuss primary texts and development of a collaborative photovoice exhibit that displays “personal embodied experience of gender euphoria through body modification,” as well as co-writing an academic journal article about this creative pro-ject. Contact faculty advisor Quinn Miller, English, for additional information.
The Queer Asian American Arts + Culture RIG application says members are forming “a reading group/art collective/supper club that thinks through the intersections across Asian American identities, queer theory and gender studies, ancestral memory and intergenerational cultural transmission, and experimental art and new media.” Graduate students in the group will meet during the academic year to discuss and conduct research on these topics while sharing food and storytelling. Goals include producing a bibliography of queer Asian American cultural production to share publicly, a multimedia digital cookbook that archives the “recipes, stories, and sensory dimensions of our meals,” and zines that “reflect on our work each term, to be printed and distributed across our communities.” Contact Rachael Sol Lee, English, for more information.
Materials for the Decolonial Philosophies RIG say their reading group began meeting in 2020 to study “decolonial, postcolonial, anti-colonial, and Indigenous scholarship with the aim of establishing a conversation between these fields that will help us to rethink and reimagine pathways for decolonization across different geopolitical spaces.” As a CSWS RIG, the group will focus on “the theme of decolonial feminisms for the coming academic year—an approach in decolonial scholarship and feminist thought that has articulated the much-needed issues and voices of the global South women from their own perspectives.” The group aims to share, discuss, and collaboratively work on their own research projects, as well as support community building for graduate students more broadly by organizing a conference on decolonial feminisms. For more information, contact faculty advisor Camisha Russell, Philosophy.
Sometimes RIGs grow into something larger, so CSWS also offers grant funding for Special Projects and Initiatives. Special Projects such as the Caregiver Campaign may become sustainable programs, while Initiatives such as the Women of Color Project have the potential for external funding.
Funding applications for RIGs, Special Projects, and Initiatives are due in May annually for group activities in the following academic year. To ensure a successful application, we advise potential applicants to attend an information session and/or consult with the director before submitting materials. Please go to the CSWS website for upcoming information sessions, application forms, and submission deadlines.
Research Grants and Writing Support
Over the past few years, COVID-19 has created unprecedented impacts on the ability of students and faculty alike to complete funded research projects. Pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 derailed research plans and made travel impossible for our grant awardees.
To compensate, the Center not only granted extensions on funded research and travel but also increased graduate student research support from 10 awards for 2020–21 to 16 awards for each of the next two academic years. As national and international travel resumed, funding for graduate student travel also has increased from two awards for 2021–22 to six awards for 2022–23.
“We have allocated more money for graduate student research grants than ever before,” Gopal says.
In addition to research grants, doctoral candidates can apply for the prestigious Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship, which provides a year of funding to complete dissertation work. Jane Grant applicants are also automatically eligible for the Writing Completion Fellowship, a summer writing stipend given to one or more runners-up for the Jane Grant award.
To improve an applicant’s chances of success, the Center offers Research Grant Information Sessions every fall and has begun hosting Graduate Student Grant Writing Workshops. “We see grant workshops as a way to help students jumpstart their research,” Gopal says.
Mike Murashige, writing consultant for the Center on Diversity and Community (CoDaC), developed and led the grant writing workshop based on his previous work as a grant writer and instructor in the non-profit sector. He also addresses how to resolve problems commonly seen in student applications for CSWS grants.
Beyond the grant writing workshop, the Center is working with Murashige on ways to support graduate student writing needs, which he says are addressed inconsistently at departmental levels across campus. “Graduate writing courses exist here and there, like in English and Anthropology,” he says, “but they’re not accessible to most students and the greater body of graduate students don’t know about them.”
Murashige says a more consistent approach to graduate student writing is needed on campus. “I get a lot of clients who come to me because they’ve experienced some distress with regard to writing in their programs,” he says, “and I get a lot of graduate students whose advisors are saying ‘you need to go get more help and I’m not the person to do that.’” In practical terms, this means he sees a lot of international students who, on the surface, appear to need help with the conventions of scholarly writing in English. “But when you look under the hood, in fact there are problems at the level of ideas and development that they haven’t actually talked about with their advisors because their advisors can’t see past the noise of the grammatical stuff.”
In response to this need, CoDaC is launching a Graduate Writing Mentorship Program to teach faculty members across disciplines how to be better graduate student writing mentors. “My goal is to create a lot of schematics that help faculty to figure out who they’re going to be as mentors and to get them using these tools,” Murashige says.
With CSWS co-sponsorship, Murashige also plans to start a speaker series focused on bringing acquiring editors to campus in order to give graduate students and junior faculty a sense of the culture at different publishing houses and how they look for titles. “I have lots of people who come to me and have no idea of how to approach an acquiring editor, and I can only give them the most basic of information,” he says. “But different presses have different cultures and run things in different ways. I think that is another of the missing pieces.”
Center Internships
With our 50th Anniversary fast approaching, over the next two years CSWS plans to offer Undergraduate and Graduate Student Internships in collaboration with the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
“We’re pitching internships as a gateway to alternative academic career paths,” Gopal says. “Doing an internship at the Center will help put into place alternatives to academic careers and help students get professionalized and mentored in skillsets that will serve well as a career.”
For the 40th Anniversary, for example, the Center received special funding to hire a graduate student for two years to do event planning, to research Center history, and to develop articles, exhibits, public talks, and more in support of Center development.
For the 50th Anniversary, student interns will assist CSWS staff with celebration event planning, publicity, fundraising activities, or related projects. Specific duties for interns will be developed in conjunction with the professional goals of the student. For more information about internships and how to apply, contact Jenée Wilde.
—Jenée Wilde is a senior instructor of English and research dissemination specialist for the Center.