As a sociology graduate student, Shannon Elizabeth Bell displayed an activist’s heart. In her first grant application to CSWS, Bell noted that women are at the fore of the anti-coal movement in central Appalachia, stepping out of their traditional gender roles to take an active leadership position in fighting the coal industry. Her scholarship had a mission—to help these women in low income coal-mining areas of West Virginia find more effective ways to use their voices through grassroots action.

by Laura Massengale, MA, Department of International Studies

by Karyn L. Lewis, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Psychology

by Susie Grimes, Graduate Student, Department of International Studies

In 2002 I was in Lusaka, Zambia, making a video documentary on a microcredit program for women with disabilities. We were at the marketplace to meet members of a sewing group that had received a small loan from the program. One of its members came forward and told us some startling news: out of the original twelve women with disabilities who had formed the collective a year earlier, only four were left. The others had died of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

by Christina Ergas, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology

by Kali Lantrip, UO Department of Counseling Psychology

by Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Kentucky

The future I hope to see for feminist research is more scholars engaging in activist research aimed at fighting the tremendous number of environmental injustices that are devastating the lives of women and other vulnerable populations around the world. 

by Erica Ciszek, PhD candidate , UO School of Journalism and Communication

by Samantha King, PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Commonwealth of Dominica is a rural island nation in the Eastern Caribbean in which most households depend upon agriculture, both for subsistence and exchange. Production is dominated by small family farms that supply global export markets as well as the intra- and inter-island trading networks that comprise a robust yet poorly-understood local food economy. 

by Kristen M. Reinhardt, M.S., PhD candidate, Department of Psychology (Clinical Psychology)