CSW receives multiple grants in support of Chemical Entanglements!
CSW has received multiple grants to support the Chemical Entanglements multi-component research project. The UCLA Council on Research awarded a Trans-disciplinary Seed Grant to the “Gendered Sentinels of Environmental Impacts” research project for the 2016-2017 academic year. This project will assess how sex and gender differences have shaped public understandings of environmental changes in the last 25 years—through methods drawn from the biological sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In the initial stage, the Co-Principal Investigators—Rachel Lee, CSW Director and Professor of English and Gender Studies, and Professor Patty Gowaty, Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology—will prioritize the loss of tolerance to everyday chemicals as reported in women, and phenomena including Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance (TILT) and Multiple Chemical Senstivity (MCS) as key sites of investigation.
In addition, the UCLA Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership and UCLA Office of Interdisciplinary & Cross Campus Affairs and the Social Sciences Dean’s Faculty Opportunity Fund have provided funding for the related “Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Exposure” project. The project, which will include a symposium, lecture, and workshop, will convene a group of researchers, scientists and community based researchers, artists, documentarians, and policy makers to assess the gendered impacts of (primarily endocrine-disrupting) chemicals on human populations. By marshaling a variety—laboratory, ethnographic, epidemiological, and narrative—of perspectives, this transdisciplinary collaboration will seek to explore how gender has made a difference in the public’s knowledge with regard to the cumulative effects of environmental toxins. A group of feminist biologists, chemists, clinicians, humanists, public health researchers, scholars in disability studies, and medical sociologists and historians, will be invited to participate.
A list of our speakers and the symposium schedule can be found HERE.
