2022 Faculty Seed Grant Awards
September 2022
The Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) has awarded 6 Seed Grants for faculty projects on women, gender, and sexuality in the summer competition. The grants support individual research activities, initial research efforts, performances, and community-based research, bringing the total amount awarded in 2022 to over $100,000.
“I am excited by the quality and range of proposals we received this year and I can’t wait to see the results from these innovative projects,” noted IRWG’s Program Director for Faculty Research Development Rebecca Shea Irvine. “IRWG’s mission is to support research on women, gender, and sexuality in the broadest sense and the recipients of this year’s Faculty Seed Grants demonstrate our commitment to supporting feminist and gender research in its many facets across the U-M community.”
The summer 2022 seed grants were awarded to the following projects (in alphabetical order):
Molly Beer - Lecturer, English
Cause & Affection: Angelica Church's Life in Revolution
Cause & Affection: Angelica Church’s Life in Revolution (forthcoming from W. W. Norton) is a creative nonfiction narrative for general/popular audiences that tells the story of the Revolution and the founding era through the life and friendships of an internationally influential woman.
Yun Jiang - Assistant Professor, School of Nursing
Collaborators: Rob Stephenson - School of Nursing; Kristi E. Gamarel - School of Public Health
Measuring Intersectional Minority Stress among Chinese Immigrant Women with Same-Sex Attraction
This project develops a minority stress scale culturally specific to Chinese immigrant women with same-sex attraction within an intersectional framework. How these women’s experience of minority stress has been comprehensively shaped by intersecting axes of race, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration is carefully examined. This scale also captures the way that this rarely studied marginalized group of women resists discrimination and stigma, individually and collectively, to counteract consequent and contingent health inequities. This culturally competent minority stress measure will inform clinical care, community resources, and policies to promote the health and wellbeing of sexually and racially discriminated women.
Andy Kirshner - Associate Professor, School of Music, Theatre, & Dance and Stamps School of Art & Design
Sex Radical
Sex Radical will be a feature-length, documentary art film that centers on the conflict between the Victorian anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock, and the less well-known feminist, marriage reformer, mystic, and free speech advocate, Ida Craddock. The legal and cultural confrontation between Craddock, whom the anarchist Emma Goldman eulogized as “one of the bravest champions of women’s emancipation” and Comstock, the self-appointed protector of American “purity,” came to a tragic end in 1902. Faced with further imprisonment under the Comstock laws for mailing frank instructional pamphlets about sex, Craddock took her own life in desperation. However, a short-term “victory” for Comstock, Craddock’s martyrdom quickly turned public opinion against him, and eventually led to an eclipse of his previously unchecked power. The IRWG Faculty Seed Grant will fund a research trip to the archives where Ida Craddock’s personal papers are kept.
Rebekah Modrak - Professor, Stamps School of Art & Design
Collaborator: Marialaura Ghidini - Independent Curator, Brescia, Italy
UnProductiveSolutions
Imagine an online company offering technologies designed, not through the masculine capitalistic logic of productivity and efficiency, but through the lens of complex personhood, feminist perspectives, and Indigenous practices. The artwork UnProductiveSolutions (UnPro) will be this online company and will offer a portfolio of technologies that embrace emotion, empathy, humor, and complicated identities, among other values. This collaboration between artist Rebekah Modrak and curator Marialaura Ghidini will create a visionary, experimental — anti-capitalist but commercial — site that will provide alternative, diverse models for technology to embolden future technologists, designers, and users.
Casey Pierce - Assistant Professor, School of Information
Collaborator: Linda Huber - PhD Candidate
Entrepreneurial Pathways & Feminization of Online Therapy Work
This project examines online therapy on telemental health platforms. Specifically, this project investigates how online therapists’ work practices and desires to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities through private practice are shaped by the feminization of mental health work and telemental health platform features. Like many other forms of care work, therapy is a highly gendered profession –approximately 80% of therapists in the U.S. are women. This research aims to understand how online therapy platforms rely on logics of feminization to make therapy work scalable and profitable, while seeming to provide work opportunities and flexibility for therapists navigating systemic conditions of feminized labor.
Vijay Singh - Clinical Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine
Collaborator: Sulan Green - Therapist
Pilot testing an adapted evidence-based intimate partner violence perpetration intervention for use by adult men
One in five men report lifetime intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration. Physicians can use IPV perpetration identification tools, yet evidence-based interventions are limited for adult male patients. I previously adapted a male IPV perpetration intervention. I will pilot test this adapted IPV perpetration intervention with 10 adult men recruited from local and national battering intervention programs. Study participants will receive the adapted intervention delivered by a trained therapist, followed by a brief survey and individual exit interview to assess acceptability and provide feedback on adapted intervention. I will integrate results into a final, adapted adult male patient IPV perpetration intervention.
