2016-17 CSWS Jane Grant Fellowship and Graduate and Faculty Grant Awardees

The Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon recently awarded more than $66,000 in graduate student and faculty research grants to support research on women and gender during the 2016-17 Academic Year. The research being funded includes projects focused all over the globe. Graduate teaching fellow Baran Germen was chosen from a strong pool of applicants to receive the prestigious Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship.

Germen holds a master’s degree from Istanbul Bilgi University and is working toward a doctorate in comparative literature. The dissertation, “Melodramatics of Turkish Modernity: Narratives of Gendered Victimhood, Affect, and Politics,” offers a historical account of the “rhetorical gendered violence that underlies the disturbing rise of gendered violence in Turkish society.” Germen undertakes a genealogical approach across media to provide an analytical framework for melodramatic aesthetics and politics by following “narratives of victimhood that traverse literature, film, and song lyrics, and infiltrate political discourse.“

CSWS also funded graduate student research on women’s ability to make decisions and control life choices in rural Pakistan; an exploration of how bananas moved from the exotic to a staple fruit through commercial tactics aimed at working-class women in the 1920s; and an investigation of linguistic practices among women who speak a minority language in western Nigeria.

Two graduate students in psychology doing collaborative research will receive funds from the Mazie Giustina Women in the Northwest endowment to support a study that will “evaluate the impact of a new strength-based video coaching program on women with young children who are living below the poverty line in the Eugene/Springfield area. The overarching goal of this line of research is to generate knowledge that can be used to improve parenting support for low-income women and better empower women who are at increased risk for involvement with the child welfare system due to poverty and contextual risk.”

CSWS-funded faculty research includes a book project by assistant professor Oluwakemi Balogun, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, titled “Beauty Diplomacy: Culture, Markets, and Politics in the Nigerian Beauty Pageant Industry.” Balogun’s research examines how women’s bodies symbolically represent the nation, as well as the material conditions that facilitate and hinder constructions of varied gendered nationalisms.

Assistant professor Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, was awarded a grant to support work on edits of her book in progress, Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Native Hawaiian Performance. Her book “analyzes multiple performance spaces where shared senses of Indigenous belonging and knowledge authorize the performance and community recognition of Indigeneity.”

In all, twelve UO graduate students will receive awards ranging from $1,700 to more than $12,000. Four faculty scholars will receive awards ranging from $5,000 to $8,000 each.

Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship

Baran Germen, Department of Comparative Literature. “Melodramatics of Turkish Modernity: Narratives of Gendered Victimhood, Affect, and Politics.”

Graduate Student Research Awards

• Sarah Ahmed, Department of Sociology. “Understanding Women’s Agency in Rural Punjab, Pakistan.”
• Yi-lun Huang, Department of English.  “The Birth of an American Staple Fruit: Reading Bananas from Cookbooks, Recipes, and Periodicals.”
• Rachel K Mallinga, Department of Public Policy, Planning, and Management. “Gender, Land, and Food Sovereignty in Nicaragua.”
• Hillary Maxson, Department of History. “Kakeibo Monogatari: Women’s Consumerism and the Postwar Japanese Kitchen.”
• Shehram Mokhtar, School of Journalism and Communication. “Women’s Dances and Men’s Pleasures: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Punjabi Theater of Lahore, Pakistan.”
• Laura Noll, Department of Psychology. “Empowering Women with a Focus on Parenting Strengths: The FIND Community Pilot Project.”
• Rebecca Paterson, Department of Linguistics. “Her Voice: Documenting the Language of Women Speakers of the Ut-Ma’in Language (Nigeria).”
• Marie-Caroline Pons, Department of Linguistics. “The Status of Women in Nomadic Raute Society.”
• Kenneth Surles, Department of History. “Beyond Bonds of Blood: Race, Gender, and Sexuality and the Making of Nonnuclear Families in Postwar America.”
• Melissa Yockelson, Department of Psychology. “Empowering Women with a Focus on Parenting Strengths: The FIND Community Pilot Project.”
• Yi Yu, Department of Geography. “Institutional Mothers, Professional Caregivers: The Biopolitics of Affective Labor in State-owned Social Welfare Institutions in China.”

Faculty Research Awards

• Oluwakemi Balogun, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. “Beauty Diplomacy: Culture, Markets, and Politics in the Nigerian Beauty Pageant Industry.”
• Mayra Bottaro, Department of Romance Languages. “Unstable Fetishisms: Labor, Gender, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Argentine Fiction.”
• Alai Reyes-Santos, Department of Ethnic Studies. “Maritime Boundaries, Water Doors: Gender, Sex, and Race in the Caribbean and the Pacific, 1898-1945.”
• Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. “Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Native Hawaiian Performance.”