CSW Awards 2016
We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2016 CSW awards. We also thank those who served on the awards committees: Virginia Coiner Classick, Dr. Constance Coiner’s sister; Laura Gomez, Professor in the School of Law; Dr. Myrna Hant, CSW Research Affiliate; Lieba Faier, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography; Katherine King, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics; Kristina Magpayo Nyden, Management Services Officer at CSW; Karen Rowe, Professor of English and founding director of CSW; and Abigail C. Saguy, Professor in the Department of Sociology. Members of the committee for the Policy Brief Prize includes CSW Director Rachel C. Lee and CSW Senior Editor Brenda Johnson-Grau.
Penny Kanner Dissertation Research Fellowship
A CSW Research Affiliate since 1990, Penny Kanner (left) received a Ph.D. in the Department of History at UCLA. Unwavering in her support of graduate students and junior faculty at UCLA, Kanner recalled in her essay, “Growing into History,” in Voices of Women Historians, that she provided CSW with funding for student awards after “seeing that professional encouragement for women graduate students was pitifully inadequate in all disciplines.” The Penny Kanner Dissertation Research Fellowship helps fund an exceptional dissertation research project pertaining to women or gender that uses historical materials and methods. Named for the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, the Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, award recognizes an outstanding research report, thesis, or article related to women and health or women in health-related endeavors.
This year’s recipient is Scottie Hale Buehler (left), a doctoral student in the Department of History, is a midwife turned historian of medicine. A Certified Professional Midwife and founder of Motherwit Midwifery, she now researches obstetrical training courses in the second half of the eighteenth-century in France. She also researches the history of the body, history of the book, and history of anatomy. For a library exhibit, she prepared a section focusing on the role of conventions of the fetus in the uterus in the creation of medical knowledge from 1500 to 1900.
Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, Graduate Award
This year’s recipient is Amy Zhou (left), a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her dissertation explores how global health priorities are negotiated and transformed in developing countries. In her award-winning article, “The Uncertainty of Treatment: Women’s Use of HIV Treatment as Prevention in Malawi,” Zhou looks at Malawi’s adoption of a new HIV policy, called Option B+, and how the policy affects healthcare services in local clinics and women’s experience with HIV treatment.
Jean Stone Research Dissertation Fellowship
Jean Stone (left), born Jean Factor, was involved with and supported UCLA for more than fifty years. Because she cared deeply about the graduate students whose research embodied the promise of the next generation of feminist scholars, she provided funds for two CSW awards. The Jean Stone Research Dissertation Fellowship provides support for a doctoral student engaged in research focusing on women and/or gender. The Paula Stone Legal Research Fellowship, which Stone created to honor her daughter, supports research that focuses on women and the law with preference given to research on women in the criminal/legal justice system.
This year’s recipient is Sharon Tran (left), a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at UCLA who specializes in Asian American literature and culture. She is working on a dissertation project, “Between Asian Girls: Minor Feminisms and Sideways Critique,” which examines the various discursive, material, and affective economies through which the “Asian girl” has been trafficked. Her research interests also include critical race studies, gender studies, queer studies, and visual culture.
Paula Stone Legal Research Fellowship
This year’s recipient is Susila Gurusami (left), a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her dissertation project, “Deprivation and Depravation: Moral Policing of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women,” uses 18 months of ethnographic observations and participatory-action data to investigate how Black women in Los Angeles navigate the day-to-day challenges of life after prison or jail. She also received the CSW Constance Coiner Graduate Fellowship in 2013.
Constance Coiner Awards
The Constance Coiner Awards honor the lives of Dr. Constance Coiner, 48, and her daughter, Ana Duarte-Coiner, 12, who perished on TWA flight #800 in June of 1996. Made possible through donations of family and friends, these awards support research on feminist and working-class issues and honor excellence in teaching and a commitment to teaching as activism.
Dr. Constance Coiner designed her own individual Ph.D. program in American Studies at UCLA, bringing together her interests in working-class literature and history. Her dissertation was completed in 1987. Coiner received numerous awards, including the very first CSW dissertation award. She joined the faculty at the State University of New York, Binghamton, in 1988. Her book, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur, published in 1995 by Oxford University Press, brilliantly illuminated the feminism of these early working-class writers and their ties to the Communist Party. A pioneering voice for feminist scholarship on women of the working class, Dr. Coiner became— at SUNY Binghamton and within the Modern Language Association—a well-respected and beloved mentor to women students who also sought forge links between women’s lives and work, between American feminism and the political left, and between oral history and literary theory.
Born while Constance was completing her doctorate, Ana Duarte-Coiner helped lead her team to a city softball championship in 1995, excelled as a student, was a reporter on a children’s television program, and was also an accomplished pianist and member of her school’s varsity tennis team.
Bo James Hwang (left) is a senior majoring in Gender Studies and minoring in Asian American Studies. He is a motivational speaker who has spoken at over fifty conferences, panels, and graduations, where he shares his story as a former homeless youth. He hosts workshops for students from under-resourced communities about how to write personal narratives for college admission and scholarships. Pursuing a career in public health, research, and medicine, Bo plans to use his education and his lived experiences to develop new ways of thinking about care, prevention, and treatment.
Katherine Maldonado (left) is an undergraduate majoring in Chicana/o Studies and a Ronald E. McNair Research Scholar. She is focused on creating feminist scholarship that voices her own experiences and those of women navigating stigma while challenging stereotypes. see my research as aiming to voice the most marginalized Women of Color. As a former gang affiliated member and teen mother from South Central Los Angeles, I am focused on creating feminist scholarship that voices my own exp
eriences and those of women navigating stigma while challenging stereotypes.I see my research as aiming to voice the most marginalized Women of Color. As a former gang affiliated member and teen mother from South Central Los Angeles, I am focused on creating feminist scholarship that voices my own experiences and those of women navigating stigma while challenging stereotypes
Christina Keenan (left) is a 4th-year Human Biology and Society major with an Anthropology minor. An activist working on sexual violence prevention and awareness efforts, she is co-director of Bruin Consent Coalition, formerly 7000 in Solidarity: A Campaign Against Sexual Assault, and an intern in the CARE (Campus Assault Resources & Education) Office. She is also a member of the UC President’s Task Force on Preventing and Responding to Sexual Violence and Sexual Assault.
Renaissance Award
A CSW Research Affiliate since 2001, Myrna Hant (left) received her Ph.D. in Higher Education from UCLA. She was a college administrator as well as an instructor in Women’s Studies at Chapman University. Presently she teaches Women’s Studies courses and courses focusing on later life issues at Chapman and at UCLA. Her research project on “Television’s Female Pioneers: New Narratives of Aging” concerns the politics of representation of again, particularly on television and specifically Six Feet Under, Brothers and Sisters, and Damages. Dr. Hant created and funds the Renaissance Award, which is a scholarship that rewards the rebirth of academic aspirations among women whose college careers were interrupted or delayed by family and/or career obligations and encourages achievement in the pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at UCLA.
The recipient of this year’s award is Sylvia Spielman-Vaught (left), who will be graduating in June of 2016 with a major in Gender Studies and minor in African American Studies. She transferred to UCLA after spending three years at West Los Angeles College while working as a cosmetologist and being an active volunteer at her children’s schools. Recently, she has been supporting her daughter, who is the co-president of the feminist club at Hamilton High School, by hosting club meetings at their home and offering topics for discussion as well as snacks and drinks.
Policy Brief Prize
The recipients of this year’s prize are Teniope Adewumi, a doctoral student in Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and Melissa M. Kelley, a master’s student in Community Health Sciences at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Honorable mention went to Isa Arriola, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology.
Teniope Adewumi is the Environmental Justice Research and Policy Analyst for Black Women for Wellness, where she engages community members to influence policies that promote safer personal care products. Her work has been featured in HuffPost Live, Think Progress and more. She completed her bachelor’s in Environmental Health Sciences at CSU San Bernardino and her master’s at UCLA. She is currently a doctoral student in Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
Melissa Kelley is a doctoral student in Community Health Sciences at the UCLA School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the physical and social impacts of hazards and disasters. In particular, her areas of concentration include chemical exposures, infectious diseases, wildfires, water scarcity, climate change, terrorism, rural-urban disparities, and risk communication. Her research employs an interdisciplinary perspective informed by the physical, life, and social sciences utilizing both traditional and spatial methods.
Isa Arriola is working towards obtaining a PhD in sociocultural anthropology. Her research focuses on the intersections of indigeneity, militarism and the environment. Specifically, she is researching the strategic role that the Mariana Islands have played in securing U.S. Military interests in Oceania. Her work aims to elucidate how the process of militarization continues to inform the contemporary cultural and political realities of the indigenous Chamorro people of the Marianas. Critical to her research, is the use of ethnographic methods to examine the way in which the politics of nature and conceptions of the physical environment inform the growing process of militarization.
