2017-18 CSWS Research Grant Awardees

“2017-18 CSWS Research Awards: Jane Grant Fellowship, Graduate and Faculty Research Grants, and the Jane Higdon Senior Thesis Scholarship”

The Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon recently awarded more than $60,000 in student and faculty research grants to support research on women and gender during the 2017-18 Academic Year. The research being funded includes projects focused in Portland, Oregon, and all over the globe.

PhD candidate Yi Yu, Department of Geography, was chosen from a strong pool of applicants to receive the prestigious Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation research “Institutional Mother, Professional Caregivers: Biopolitics of Affective Labor in Chinese State-owned Social Welfare Institution.” Yu’s research focuses on “female professional caregivers in China’s state-owned social welfare institutions and examines the complex roles they play in raising orphans.”

CSWS also funded two sociology graduate students who are exploring work-life conflicts among workers in Portland, Oregon, with particular attention to women, minorities, and immigrants, in sectors that use unpredictable scheduling practices. Another grant funds a sociology graduate student doing an ethnographic study that examines “how Latina moms of kids with disabilities become advocates for themselves and their children in the special education system in Oregon.” CSWS will also support the research of a doctoral student in human physiology, who is studying physiological and functional differences in traumatic brain injury in women and men, work which can be used “to establish sex-specific rehabilitation protocols.”

Margaret Bostrom, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, received both a CSWS Graduate Research Grant and the new Fortnightly Research Grant, funded by the Fortnightly Club of Eugene. Bostrum’s research is titled, “Are you sure, Sweetheart, that you want to be well?: Feminisms, Fitness, and the Politics of Wellness and Welfare in the 1980s.”

CSWS-funded faculty research includes a book project by Eileen Otis, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, on “Women, Wal-Mart and Labor Resistance in China.” Otis will investigate recent organized resistance among the mostly women workers at Wal-Mart retail stores in southern China, the “final segment of a long-term ethnographic project examining the experiences, opportunities, conundrums and new identities created by the labor of women in China’s globalizing service sector, focusing on the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart.” CSWS previously supported earlier work on this project.

Faculty grant recipient Dyana Mason, an assistant professor in the Department of Public Planning, Public Policy and Management (PPPM), is studying community development projects in Laos to gather material to help understand the clashing ideas in structure and ideology among stakeholders for her project, “Institutional Logics, Hybridity and Women’s Empowerment in an International Development Program.” Michelle Byrne, a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Psychology, is gathering information about how interactions between childhood maltreatment and mental health affect the immune system in adolescent girls for her project, “Interactions of Abuse and Mental Illness in the Development of Girls’ Immune Health.” Tatiana Bryant, an assistant librarian in the UO Libraries, was awarded funding for her project, “Gender Performance and Identity in Librarianship.”

In all, ten UO graduate students will receive awards ranging from $1,000 to more than $12,000. Four faculty scholars will receive awards ranging from $3,000 to $6,000 each.

Additionally, CSWS selected Delaney Swink, a senior in the Department of International Studies, as the recipient of the 2017-18 *Jane Higdon Senior Thesis Scholarship for her thesis “Social Change in Morocco: Islamic Feminism and Women’s Rights to Education.” Swink aims to “examine the complexity of Islamic feminism in Morocco, analyze the role and impact of governmental and nonprofit institutions on gender equality in Morocco, and propose solutions for female empowerment based on these findings.”

2017–18 Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship

• Yi Yu, Department of Geography: “Institutional Mother, Professional Caregivers: Biopolitics of Affective Labor in Chinese State-owned Social Welfare Institutions.”

2017-18 Graduate Student Grant Awardees

• Camila Alvarez, Department of Sociology: “Hyper-exploitation of Immigrant Women of Color: Thinking intersectionally about gender, race, and nation in the study of unpredictable scheduling practices.”
• Margaret Bostrom, Department of English: “Are you sure, Sweetheart, that you want to be well?: Feminisms, Fitness, and the Politics of Wellness and Welfare in the 1980s.” Also awarded the Fortnightly Research Grant.
• Anna Cook, Department of Philosophy: “Settler Denial as an Epistemology of Ignorance.”
• Lacey Guest, Departments of History and Women’s and Gender Studies: “Magic and Power: Educating African-American College Students in the Science of Marriage, 1920s-1960s.”
• Lola Loustanau, Department of Sociology: “Incomprehensible Working Experiences: Hyper-exploitation, Quiescence and Resistance among Immigrant non-English Speaking Workers in Portland, Oregon.”
• Amanda Morris, Departments of Human Physiology: “The Effect of Mental Fatigue in Postural Stability in Women and Men.”
• Angela Rovak, Department of English: “Toward the Genomics Era: Speculative Heritages in Kindred and Dawn.”
• Katie Warden, Department of Sociology: “Advocacy Strategies of Mothers of Children with Disabilities.”
• Alia Yasen, Department of Human Physiology: “Physiological Consequences of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in Women and Men.”

2017-18 Faculty Grant Awards

• Tatiana Bryant, UO Libraries: “Gender Performance and Identity in Librarianship.” 
• Michelle Byrne, Department of Psychology: “Interactions of Abuse and Mental Illness in the Development of Girls’ Immune Health.” 
• Dyana Mason, Department of Public Planning, Public Policy and Management (PPPM): “Institutional Logics, Hybridity and Women’s Empowerment in an International Development Program.”
• Eileen Otis, Department of Sociology: “Women, Wal-Mart and Labor Resistance in China.”

2017-18 Undergraduate Jane Higdon Senior Thesis Scholarship*

• Delaney Swink, Department of International Studies, “Social Change in Morocco: Islamic Feminism and Women’s Rights to Education.” Faculty Adviser: Yvonne Braun.

*The Higdon Scholarship honors the life and work of Jane Higdon, a faculty researcher at the Linus Pauling Institute at OSU and an avid cyclist who was killed while bicycling on a rural road outside Eugene in May 2006.  The financial support for the scholarship is provided by the Jane Higdon Foundation, which is dedicated to encouraging and empowering young people to pursue healthy and active lifestyles and academic excellence.