The Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) awarded $94,000 for scholarship, research, and creative work on women and gender at the University of Oregon for AY 2026–27. A total of 20 grants and fellowships were given to 16 graduate students and four faculty members.
Sociology doctoral candidate Bex McFife won the prestigious Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship for their project, “Gen(der)italia: Pelvic Physical Therapy, Genital-focused Interactions, and Liberatory Embodiment in Healthcare.” The Jane Grant Fellow receives a $27,000 stipend and UO student health insurance for the academic year. In addition, the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation (OVPRI) provides tuition remission for the academic year.
In the project abstract, McFife notes that US biomedicine serves white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism not only through unjust distributions of health, wellness, and quality of care, but also by keeping us alienated and distanced from our own bodies. “However, there is a counter-model of care in which patients are encouraged to feel their bodies more rather than less—often with transformative results. Pelvic physical therapy (PPT) addresses pelvic floor conditions (pain, incontinence, sexual dysfunction, childbirth impacts, etc.) by manually treating pelvic anatomy via the vagina, rectum, and/or external pubic area. Although PPT is often believed to be only for women, it is appropriate for people of all genders and anatomies and thus offers an opportunity to examine how gender, sex, and power shape our perceptions of bodies.”
McFife says that PPT is a window into gender itself, as genitalia and reproductive processes are fundamental to ideas about biological sex and thus gender and race at large. Through interviews with providers, recipients, and focus groups, McFife analyzes “how patients and providers navigate the social complexity of extended clinical genital touch in the context of biomedicine, embodied social norms, gender-based violence, and queer, trans, intersex, racialized, disabled, and traumatized lived experience,” thus bringing more trauma-informed and liberatory care practices into healthcare.
CSWS has awarded the Jane Grant Fellowship to graduate students at the UO since 1983. This highly competitive dissertation award supports projects from a range of disciplines on topics related to women and gender. The award is open to eligible UO doctoral students who are ABD and spend the award year writing their dissertation.
CSWS also awards summer Graduate Writing Completion Fellowships to support one or more doctoral students who are in the early stages of their dissertation and who were runners-up for the Jane Grant Fellowship. This year, one writing completion fellowship was awarded to philosophy doctoral candidate Maia Wellborn for the project, “Against Disclosure: On the Lived Experience of Revealing Trans Existence,” which explores how trans people negotiate compulsory disclosure and are held captive to normative gendered frames, arguing that nondisclosure is necessary for living gender concretely.
For the first time this year, CSWS is awarding a competitive new Faculty Research Fellowship that provides one course release for 2026-27 to pursue work on any aspect of the study of women and gender. The first recipients of this fellowship are Smadar Ben-Natan, assistant professor of global studies, for the project “Truth and Weaponization: The Polarization over Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Palestine/Israel after October 7,” which explores how the war created a crisis of truth and conflicting loyalties in feminist analysis and activism; and Hannah Thomas, assistant professor of dance, for the project “Joy in the City,” a dance residency-to-performance workshop for Black women dance artists in collaboration with UO students.
In addition, one research award is eligible for funding from the Giustina Fund for Women in the Northwest. In 1997, CSWS received a large private gift from Mazie Giustina to promote and spotlight research on women’s lives in the Pacific Northwest. This year’s Giustina funding went to sociology doctoral candidate Alajandra Pedraza for her project, “Borderlands of Belonging: The Mobility Pathways of Latinas in Oregon's Racialized Spaces,” which explores how limiting pressures to upward mobility persist even after educational and professional milestones are reached.
The following is a complete list of CSWS grant and fellowship awardees and their projects:
Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship
- Bex McFife, Sociology, “Gen(der)italia: Pelvic Physical Therapy, Genital-focused Interactions, and Liberatory Embodiment in Healthcare.”
Graduate Writing Completion Fellowship
- Maia Wellborn, Philosophy, "Against Disclosure: On the Lived Experience of Revealing Trans Existence."
Graduate Student Research Awards
- Oscar Boakye, Communication and Media Studies, “Chills from the Labor Ward: Rethinking Culture and Religion as Underlying Barriers to Maternal Healthcare in Ghana.”
- Jolly Dee, Anthropology, “Embodied Inequities: Gendered Experience, Inflammation, and Chronic Pain Among Transgender and Nonbinary People in the United States.”
- Anantaa Ghosh, Comparative Literature, “Life Narratives and Archival Silences: Reconstructing the Histories of Kotal, Ao, and Rathnamal.”
- Sophie Glasswell, Sociology, "Ultrarunning Beyond the Binary: LGBTIQ+ Athletes and the Queer Potential of Sports."
- Sabina Mensah, Environmental Studies, “Women, Food Sovereignty, and Postharvest Management in Northern Ghana.”
Gowri Nair, English, “Precarious Girlhood: Reading Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass.” - Gretchen Nihill, Psychology, “Towards a Gender Diverse Social Vision: Gender Identity and Expression Outside the Gender Binary.”
- Alajandra Pedraza, Sociology, “Borderlands of Belonging: The Mobility Pathways of Latinas in Oregon's Racialized Spaces” (Giustina Fund).
- Sanjula Rajat, Philosophy, “Hindu Nationalism, Reproductive Justice, and the Politics and Possibilities of Trans Reproduction in India.”
- Mariana Rivera, Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, “Embodying Excess, Resisting Colonialism: The Art of Aesthetics of Excess.”
- Hulda Sakyi, Global Studies, “Women, Food Sovereignty, and Postharvest Management in Northern Ghana.”
- Julie Williams-Reyes, Philosophy, “Technoscience and Feminist Metamorphoses of Fanon’s Historical Racial Schema.”
- Asako Yonan, Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, “Objects of Kinship: Soft Power, Hardbodies, and the Recoding of Fetish with/in the Nikkei Diaspora and Asian American Visual Culture.”
Faculty Research Fellowships
- Smadar Ben-Natan, Global Studies, “Truth and Weaponization: The Polarization over Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Palestine/Israel after October 7.”
- Hannah Thomas, Dance, “Joy in the City” (performance and workshop).
Faculty Research Awards
- Erin Beck, Political Science, “Engaging Men and Shifting Masculinities to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls.”
- Nissryne Dib, Cinema Studies, “Natural” (short film).