2024 Graduate Student Research Awards
The Institute for Research on Women and Gender has awarded 14 graduate students funding to support wide-ranging projects related to women, gender, and sexuality.
Two Boyd/Williams Dissertation Grants were awarded for projects related to women and work. Through this award, IRWG supports projects that promote knowledge about and enhance understanding of the complexities of women’s roles in relation to their paid and unpaid labor. This prestigious dissertation fellowship is named for two sisters: Ruth Rodman Boyd (1892-1981), a longtime community activist, and Shirley Rodman Williams (1894-1999), who had a long career in the Detroit business community.
IRWG/Rackham Community of Scholars summer fellowships were granted to 12 doctoral candidates from disciplines in the humanities and social sciences whose dissertations incorporate interdisciplinary feminist perspectives, or focus on women, gender, or sexuality. Awardees participate in a facilitated weekly interdisciplinary seminar during May and June. The students were selected from a highly competitive pool.
The diverse set of graduate student projects demonstrates the scope of gender studies at U-M.
Boyd/Williams Dissertation Grant recipients and their projects (in alphabetical order) are:
Loveleen Brar, PhD Candidate, American Culture
Project Title: Routed Communities: Race, Care, and Labor at the Dhaba
This project looks at the rising number of Punjabis in the American trucking industry. While ample attention has been paid to the Punjabis driving cross country, less attention has been paid to the Punjabi owned truck stops, called dhabas, that have popped up across the major interstates to cater to this new cadre of drivers. These stops, including a Punjabi restaurant, are often staffed by family members and co-ethnics. Using ethnographic methods, this chapter looks at the reproductive labor of the women employed by these truck stops, asking, “what networks of care are created and recreated in the diaspora?”
Irene Mora, PhD Candidate, History and Women’s and Gender Studies
Project Title: City Mothers: Latina-led Community Formations in Detroit, 1920-1980
Mora’s interdisciplinary research in history and women's and gender studies employs a feminist methodology to explore gender-centered questions about Detroit’s Latino/a community. Her research focuses on understanding and valuing the informal labor and care work of Latina women, particularly work outside wage labor contexts. She explores connections between care work and community formation in twentieth-century Detroit, revealing the vital role of Latinas in urban community development. Care work is overlooked by historians because it is difficult to document and primarily performed by women; this project confronts these archival and historical gaps.
IRWG / Rackham Community of Scholars recipients (in alphabetical order) are:
monét cooper, PhD Candidate, Joint Program in English and Education
Project Title: Between Freedom and Capture: Quare Youths' Literacies of Everyday Aliveness in the Un/care of School
This dissertation investigates quare youths’ literacy practices within their Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) using Black aliveness (Quashie, 2021) to explore how they create and spatialize freedom through their literacy practices, unfixing Black gender and sexuality within literacy study. Using critical ethnography, cooper asks: How does aliveness inform quare youths’ creation and deployment of their literacy practices of dress-ornamentation, reading groups, discussion circles, and literacy objects? How do quare youths’ GSA-based literacy practices engage with space, interiority, and their capacity to express aliveness? How do quare youths’ GSA-based literacy practices make space for themselves within school? What do they desire for themselves?
Amber Hardiman, PhD Candidate, Film, Television and Media
Project Title: :"Something of a Genre”: Premium Documentary Television & The Legitimation of Feminist Advocacy in the Digital Age
This project analyzes a nascent televisual documentary genre that uses the rhetoric of feminist advocacy impact to achieve prestige, status, and legitimacy in the public sphere. Placing her analysis within the context of the U.S. television industry’s reconfiguration of its commercial practices in the digital era, Hardiman explores how this new genre aligns with the commercial, neoliberal, and racialized logics of popular feminism, and what Patricia Hill Collins calls the feminist “ethic of caring.” She ultimately analyzes the genre's exploitation of the contemporary visibility and popularity of feminist activism, alongside the salience of high-profile trials concerned with gender-based violence.
Mara Johnson, PhD Candidate, Educational Studies
Project Title: Living Authentically: Black Queer Girls' Agency in School Contexts
Education researchers’ have increasingly emphasized intersectional approaches; however, attention to queer identity is often relegated to recommendations sections. Further, though scholars have called for centering Black queer girls and queer girls of color, their perspectives remain largely absent in education research. The extant literature about LGBTQ+ youths’ school lives often hyperfocuses on violence—subsequently diminishing the complexity of queer life and dismissing the possibility that queer youth can and do thrive. In response, this study centers Black queer girls' accounts of their school experiences and enactments of agency—how they work to live authentically and joyfully despite schools' structural and relational violence.
Julianna Loera-Wiggins, PhD Candidate, American Culture
Project Title: Wild Tongues that Lash: Theory of the Flesh and Testimonio in Chicana/x and Latina/x Stand-Up Comedy
Loera-Wiggins’s dissertation is an interdisciplinary study interested in how Chicana and Latina comedians use stand-up comedy to address social and racial inequalities and how humor is used as a feminist tool to express the Latina/x experience as a "theory in the flesh." She traces the origins of Chicana/x and Latina/x stand-up comedy in the United States to understand how Chicana and Latina stand-up comedians subvert dominant and violent notions of race, citizenship, and sexuality through comedy. Her research demonstrates that Chicanas/Latinas use humor as a strategy of community building and as a platform to enact their bodily autonomy.
Mix Mann, PhD Candidate, History
Project Title: She Feels Like Home: Black Women and Queer Domesticity, 1861-1974
“She Feels Like Home” is a comparative study of four Black couples and the domestic spaces—both real and imagined—they shared. Scholars have established that Black women often enacted their queer desires in residential spaces. Blending Black feminist geographies and queer phenomenology, this project attends to the homes themselves to meditate on the significance of domestic space in Black queer history. What erotic and romantic possibilities could emerge in built environments? Using tax, architectural, probate, and prison records, this project considers how Black women positioned their physical, emotional, and economic selves in relationship to other Black women.
Anaridia Molina, PhD Candidate, English Language and Literature
Project Title: Unveiling Caribbean Women’s Literary Legacy: Insights from ACWWS’ Archives
Molina’s project turns to the digital archive of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS) to underscore the vital role of smaller conferences and service to the profession in shaping Caribbean studies. It emphasizes the contributions of women of color feminists in establishing a Caribbean women’s literary tradition and traces Caribbean women’s intellectual and creative journey. Today, women writers are central to Caribbean literature, yet their works were overlooked until the late 1970s. This archival history emphasizes the significance of coming together for Caribbean women amidst marginalization, making ACWWS a crucial site for a regional Caribbean intellectual history.
Mel Monier, PhD Candidate,Communication and Media
Project Title: #seahorsedads: Trans Masculinity, Pregnancy and Social Media
This dissertation chapter aims to explore the ways that trans masculine folks use online spaces for identity formation, information sharing, and community building during pregnancy and early parenthood. Using the hashtag #seahorsedads is a vibrant and diverse community of trans masc parents who have documented their pregnancy journeys, using the affordances of social media to control their narratives and engage in valuable self-representation. This project will use textual analysis of popular accounts using #seahorsedads to explore the risks and benefits of being hypervisible as a pregnant trans masc person online.
Aspen Mulvey, PhD Candidate, Anthropology
Project Title: Anxious Affects: Whiteness and Embodied Transformation
Mulvey’s dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nashville, TN in 2018 and 2019. Using field notes on the athletic practice of members at two nearly all-white, high-intensity strength gyms as a point of departure, this project explores wide-ranging relationships with and commitments to whiteness, masculinities, and anxious athletic movement. This dissertation analyzes materials from Nashville fieldwork alongside auto-theoretical reflection in an attempt to detail contradictory affective stances of fervently-moving anxious Americans who find themselves concerned with both whiteness and masculinity.
Sara Ruiz, PhD Candidate, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Project Title: The Unknown Soldier is Best Remembered
This project examines the role of gender and ethnicity in representations of Soviet World War II veterans. Soviet national identity was articulated as a multiethnic, egalitarian, and internationalist project, and this “all-national” (vsyesoiuzny) mobilization was a core tenet of patriotic discourse. Using veteran testimony, military archival sources, and documentary film, Ruiz uncovers experiences of Soviet Jewish veterans that have been excluded or ignored. Drawing on the work of gender historians and feminist analyses of the Holocaust, she argues that neither the valorization nor victimization of Jews was compatible with the militarization of Soviet national belonging after 1941.
AunRika Tucker-Shabazz, PhD Candidate, Sociology
Project Title: Learning from the Outsiders Within: Incest and the Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Boundary Work
Mainstream European and American social theory of incest, including feminist theory in particular, systematically exclude the knowledge and experience of racialized groups (Curry and Utley 2018; Gonzalez-Lopez 2015; Ashe and Cahn 1993). The persistent exclusion of racialized standpoints from professional curriculum about incestuous violence reproduces sociology as a colonial social science. This paper celebrates methodological contributions of Black intellectuals disrupting the false scientific/unscientific knowledge boundary. Since critical and feminist theory written about incest by white Europeans (Bell 1993; Russell 1986, Herman 1981; Foucault 1975) fail to account for colonialism and empire, Black scholars who do provide new answers to old questions.
Katherine Wright, PhD Candidate, Sociology
Project Title: Beyond “Cultural” Difference: Understanding how race influences patient-provider interactions during childbirth
How does racism operate in healthcare interactions to affect maternal health outcomes? Inquiries into the impacts of systemic racism on health miss how mechanisms in the delivery of healthcare produce racial health disparities via patient-provider interactions. Through maternity care experiences, a well-documented site of persistent racial health disparities, Wright’s dissertation analyzes patterns in 1019 self-reported childbirth experiences and healthcare navigational strategies from a socioeconomically diverse sample of Black and White women. She argues that racial hierarchies make interactional styles and resources salient to health outcomes, because racism affects how providers perceive, respond to, and make care-decisions for patients.
Yixuan Wu, PhD Candidate, Philosophy
Project Title: Racializing Perception and Vicarious Desire
This paper integrates the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty's account of sexual agency (1945/2013) and the feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye's notion of "arrogant perception" (1983), to better understand the phenomenon of racial fetish and explain its harmful effects. Wu argues that the perceived person under the racializing perception has diminished sexual agency, and the sexual world she projects before herself is “vicarious". This is because her sexual world is fraught with social imaginaries which have a history of colonization and exploitation, and she is also the object of perception in her sexual world.
IRWG graduate fellowships are offered once per year.
