Feminist Scholars Fellowship
Dr. Annie Menzel, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies: is a political theorist and former midwife. Her work focuses on understanding how white supremacy, colonization, and gender-based oppression shape human reproductive life, health, and care—as well as theorizations and praxes of reproductive justice and freedom. Her research and teaching foreground race, gender, and reproductive politics and practices in North America; Black political thought, especially Black feminisms; feminist political theory and queer theory; abolitionist and anti-colonial theory and praxis; biopolitics; and feminist science and technology studies of reproductive health and medicine.
Project Summary:
A major shift is underway in left organizing, theory, and praxis: away from purity politics, cancel culture, and gatekeeping, toward invitation, welcome, and broad coalitions. “On Inviting and Being Invited,” aims to understand the geneses, precedents, articulations, and impacts of these invitations across reproductive justice, disability justice, Indigenous thought and practice around environment, food, and land, and anti-colonial, anti-fascist, and abolitionist feminist scholarship and movements. It tracks framings of invitation as urgent in the face of climate collapse, surging fascism, and ongoing genocides. It also maps practices of invitation, including calls for “ushers not bouncers” on the left, on-ramps for potential members, and activation of kinship and solidarity across vast cultural and political differences. It will also explore the role of invitation in key theorizations and sites of solidarity, coalition, mutual aid, collective care, and kinship. Finally, the project will invite scholars and organizers to reflect on experiences of inviting and being invited.
During her semester as the CRGW’s Feminist Scholar, she will be working to map this invitational turn and its specificities and interconnections across distinct sites; investigating protocols and practices of invitation; and inviting dialogue with thinkers and organizers, toward both a theory of invitation and models for growing movements and collectives toward just and sustainable futures.
Kaplan Dissertation Fellowship in LGBTQ+ Studies
Ben Lobovitz: (he/they) is a former high school choir teacher and Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) advisor from southern Arizona. They are advised by Dr. Mollie McQuillan in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. Grateful to receive the Kaplan Dissertation Fellowship in LGBTQ+ Studies Award, this support will help them engage more deeply in their dissertation and disseminate their findings to educators and community partners.
Project Summary:
This three-paper dissertation explores the role of adults (e.g., parents, caregivers, and educators) in considering the role of school policy and school climate in benefiting trans as well as LGBTQ+ youth. Especially as regressive policy mandates generate uncertainty over how to support LGBTQ+, and especially trans, youth in educational settings, Ben’s work pushes back on this tension and traditional “parents’ rights” framing by centering supports for LGBTQ+ youth.
Deborah A. Hobbins Graduate Student Award in Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: By examining how “woman” is constituted as the uncritical subject of family planning efforts in India, Thomas aims to contribute to decolonizing quantitative measurement of gender and health and working toward more nuanced frameworks for understanding reproductive agency in postcolonial contexts. Thomas will use this award to conduct formative review work and archival research, fieldwork in India and theory-building on women’s reproductive agency, in addition to submitting a resulting paper to a conference and including it as part of my PhD degree requirement.
John Clarence De Cleene Scholarship
Valeria Rojas: Her senior thesis, The Mythopoesis of La Veneka: Relational Futures Past Nationalism, theorizes alternative modes of applying queerness as a way to conceptualize a mode of resistance to both assimilation and binary opposition. Drawing on Venezuelan cultural elements, it envisions a future where queer people of color can thrive on their own terms—rooted in community, memory, and resistance.
Rojas plan to use the John Clarence De Cleene Award to support archival research, printing zines related to my thesis, and engaging in community-centered storytelling initiatives that honor queer and trans Venezuelan experiences. This support will help sustain her commitment to research that bridges academia and advocacy.
Irene L. De Cleene Scholarship
Brianna Washington: Her project, Cultural Perceptions of Postpartum Depression in Black Women, explores how cultural beliefs, systemic racism, economic hardship, and a lack of culturally competent care affect Black women’s experiences with postpartum depression (PPD). It argues that Black women are disproportionately affected by PPD due to historical distrust of the healthcare system, stigmatization of mental health in Black communities, inadequate access to care, and societal expectations such as the “strong Black woman” stereotype. The paper calls for culturally sensitive interventions, increased representation of Black mental health professionals, and policy changes to improve care and outcomes for Black mothers.
She plans to use the award to support my continued educational goals, including course materials, academic conferences, and other opportunities that will further her learning and advocacy within health equity.
Ruth Bleier Scholarship in the Natural Sciences
Claudia Liverseed: will be using this scholarship to help support her participation in summer research in collaboration with the other co-directors of my student organization, Global Partners for Community Health and Empowerment (formerly known as Project Malawi). They are working with our Malawian community partner, IPEQI, to research the health needs of grandmother-headed households affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, in addition to examining how student leadership within our organization conceptualizes and operationalizes equal partnerships in global health and can serve as a model for others. Our travel plans were unfortunately impacted for this summer, but we hope to visit our partner in Malawi in the next year or so.
Hyde Dissertation Research Award
Simekha M. Cynthia: is a PhD candidate in the Curriculum and Instruction department. Her research explores the gendered-sexualities and reproductive health education (GSRHE) genealogies and its embodied performance within digital and visual popular cultures in Kenya as a way to (re)think being, citizenship, the education curriculum, and societal moral ethics at large, especially constructions of the Kenyan girl/woman.
Short explanation of project:
Her project focuses on how GSRHE is key in reinforcing ideologies and processes of ‘making up’ citizenship, personhood, and rethinking binaries of human and nonhuman. Specifically, she asks: How do visual cultures and creative technologies mediate, negotiate, and shape GSRHE as a tool for sociopolitical education in Kenya to forge ideas of ‘ideal citizen’ through centering the ‘feminized body ‘? This project centers youth and women in informal settlements, rural areas, and other marginalized communities especially from the LGBTQIA+ communities as they are often erased from: 1) engaging in any form of knowledge production and re-righting and re-writing their stories within the Kenyan sociopolitical arena; and 2) accessing any reproductive health care; hence offering complex nuanced counternarratives of Kenya’s public imagination of gender and sexuality, which is bound to heteronormativity. This work is deeply rooted in field-based inquiry, and thanks to your invaluable support, she will be able to carry out the remaining critical phases of fieldwork -such as conducting oral histories and translations, facilitating body-mapping exercises to women groups and completing member-checking phase-that lies at the heart of her project.
Worcester/Whatley/Leavitt Award
Autumn Miller: (she/her) will continue her doctoral research on body politics, racial capitalism, and statecraft. Her research examines the pivotal role of anti-fatness (such as “anti-obesity” initiatives) within the maintenance of racial capitalism and the state, through an emphasis on economic productivity and military readiness. She is currently looking at the uptick in marketing of weight loss medications (such as Ozempic), which render fatness as a disease in need of eradication, and promise a future free of bodily diversity as means of bolstering economic productivity and military readiness. Through this research, Autumn identifies anti-fat bodily management as a significant site of inquiry for feminist critiques of capitalism and statecraft (including institutions that maintain it, such as militarism).
Kaplan Award in LGBTQ+ Studies
Amelia Erdman: (she/her) is so honored to have been selected as the next recipient of the Kaplan Award in LGBTQ+ Studies. This award will go toward supporting her family and herself in funding my college tuition. She is very glad to be studying Gender and Women’s Studies and getting a certificate in LGBTQ+ Studies at UW Madison. Her education has helped her feel more prepared for a future career in social justice education and advocacy
Kaplan Award in LGBTQ+ Studies
Phoenix Rowell: (they/them) their goal is to become a neurodiverse and queer affirming clinical therapist, as queer people of color especially have a hard time finding good therapists that look like them. Sexuality has been a huge passion theirs for years, and they are excited to integrate their learning from the LGBTQ+ Studies certificate with their background in social work. This award will help immensely in the pursuit of that goal, as they will be using it to help fund their master’s in social work, starting this fall.
Kaplan Award in LGBTQ+ Studies
Carson Schwartz: current project is comparing rates of orgasm coercion and faked orgasm between monosexual (attracted to one gender) and plurisexual (people attracted to more than one gender) individuals using data previously collected by the Chadwick Lab. Schwartz will be using the Kaplan Award to help fund my summer classes so they can begin working on a project that further explores plurisexual sexual experiences.
Kaplan Award in LGBTQ+ Studies
Camren Livermore: (they/he) studies Biochemistry and Gender & Women’s Studies with a certificate in LGBTQ+ Studies. Within the Gender & Women’s Studies Department, their interests are focused on addressing the impacts of cisheteropatriarchal structures of power on LGBTQ+ wellbeing and access to resources, particularly within the healthcare context. This award will contribute directly to their educational expenses.
Kaplan Award in LGBTQ+ Studies
Claire Hoppe: (she/her) One project that she is proud of from her LGBTQ+ studies classes is a monologue she wrote for GEN&WS 344: Bi/Pan/Asexuality, where she reflected on my own experiences as a bisexual woman, working to understand how some of my life experiences have been affected by my identity. This project helped her understand both myself on a deeper level, as well as aiding me in my understanding of others in the LGBTQ+ community. This summer, she will be aiding in the transcription of oral histories collected for the first book on Stonewall, a project she am very excited to work on! She plans to use this award to cover educational expenses, lessening the financial strain on her and her family and allowing her to dedicate more time to her classes and her educational focus on LGBTQ+ History.