2020-2021 CSW Student Award Recipients

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We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2020-2021 CSW Student Awards and Fellowships!

CSW is proud to honor the achievements of UCLA graduate and undergraduate students who conduct groundbreaking research and activism around issues related to women and gender. The 2021-2022 recipients were celebrated during the 2021 Awards Celebration on May 20, 2021.

Penny Kanner Dissertation Research Fellowship

Funded by the late Penny Kanner, a longtime CSW Research Affiliate, this Fellowship helps fund an exceptional dissertation research project pertaining to women or gender that uses historical materials and methods.

Jaimie D. Crumley

Jaimie D. Crumley (she/her/hers) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. Jaimie’s dissertation, “Tried as by Fire,” provides a Black feminist intellectual history of the abolitionist and women’s liberation work that Christian women of African descent did in the United States from 1789-1880. Jaimie is a graduate student coordinator of the Black Feminism Initiative at UCLA. Jaimie’s work has received support from the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the Black Feminism Initiative at UCLA, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, Graduate and Undergraduate Awards

Funded by Mrs. Jean Stone and 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.

Jordan Thomas (Graduate Award Recipient)

Jordan Thomas is a doctoral student in clinical psychology. She earned her BA from Connecticut College and previously worked in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health. Jordan’s research examines women’s health across the reproductive lifecycle—with emphasis on the impact of adversity and trauma exposure on sexual health and intimate relationships. She is interested in interventions that promote sexual and reproductive health at both the individual (i.e., clinical intervention) and population (i.e., policy) level. Clinically, Jordan specializes in trauma/PTSD and couples therapy.

Tania Nasrollahi (Undergraduate Award Recipient)

Tania Nasrollahi’s hometown is Los Angeles, California. Broadly, her research interests include cultural sociology, sociological theory, and ethnographic methods. She is graduating Summa Cum Laude from UCLA with BA degrees in sociology and anthropology. More specifically, she researches the impacts of categorization systems on identity formation, negotiation, and contestation. She recently committed to Indiana University-Bloomington’s sociology PhD program, where she intends to study processes of women’s adoption and avoidance of categories related to sexual violence. Tania hopes to ultimately join the professoriate as a sociologist.

Jean Stone Dissertation Research Fellowship

Jean Stone cared deeply about the graduate students whose research embodied the promise of the next generation of feminist scholars. The Jean Stone Research Dissertation Fellowship provides support for a doctoral student engaged in research focusing on women and/or gender.

Rebekah Israel Cross

Rebekah is a doctoral candidate at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in the Department of Community Health Sciences and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar. Her research involves measuring racism-related social determinants of health. Her research agenda focuses on two areas: 1) conceptualization and measurement of structural racism in population health research; 2) examination of housing-related determinants of maternal and infant health inequities. Her dissertation examines how gentrification and racial resegregation impact preterm birth among Black women in Northern California.

Paula Stone Legal Research Fellowship

Funded by Jean Stone and named in honor of her daughter, the Paula Stone Legal Research Fellowship supports research that focuses on women and the law with preference given to research on women in the criminal/legal justice system.

Antwann Michael Simpkins

Antwann Michael Simpkins is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Antwann’s research and advocacy work is located at the intersection of race, gender, and law. His current research project examines the experiences of Black women with the carceral state. By illuminating the experiences of Black women with the carceral state, Antwann conceptualizes carcerality in various geographical spaces, as opposed to being limited to the physical structure of the prison. His methodological approach in research engages archival approaches as well as geographic information systems.

Rosie Stockton

Rosie Stockton is a PhD student in the gender studies department. Their research draws on abolitionist feminisms, Black feminist thought, and queer and trans critique to think with political and aesthetic practices of anti-carceral resistance. They look specifically at the political economy of the California carceral state, focusing on long term sentencing, the criminalization of social reproduction, and abolitionist practices of care, kinship, and mutual aid. They are a member of the Black Feminism Initiative, and they are an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and the DROP LWOP campaign. They are the author of a book of poetry Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021).

Constance Coiner Graduate and Undergraduate Awards

These 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.

Clementine Bordeaux (Graduate Award Recipient)

Clementine Bordeaux (Sičáŋǧu Oglála Lakóta) is an artist and doctoral candidate in the World Arts and Cultures department. Clementine received a Master’s degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, through the Native Voices Indigenous documentary film program and an undergraduate degree in theatre from Carthage College. Clementine also sits on the Board for Cornerstone Theatre Company (LA) and is a collaborator for Racing Magpie arts consulting organization in South Dakota. Their research interests include: Lakota ontology, Indigenous feminisms, Indigenous representation, visual anthropology, digital/new media, and community based participatory research.

Brooke Helmick (Undergraduate Award Recipient)

Brooke Helmick is an undergraduate student majoring in gender studies and double minoring in global studies and theatre. Currently serving as a Policy Fellow for LA Civil Rights, she hopes to take on a career in human rights and advocacy. Brooke graduates this year with Latin Honors and is an alumna of the Chancellor’s LINK program. Her research interests include examining climate change in conjunction with gender, migratory flows, and international development. This fall she will begin her master’s degree in human rights studies at Columbia University.

Tania Nasrollahi (Undergraduate Award Recipient)

Tania Nasrollahi’s hometown is Los Angeles, California. Broadly, her research interests include cultural sociology, sociological theory, and ethnographic methods. She is graduating Summa Cum Laude from UCLA with BA degrees in sociology and anthropology. More specifically, she researches the impacts of categorization systems on identity formation, negotiation, and contestation. She recently committed to Indiana University-Bloomington’s sociology PhD program, where she intends to study processes of women’s adoption and avoidance of categories related to sexual violence. Tania hopes to ultimately join the professoriate as a sociologist.

Lesley Ramirez (Undergraduate Award Recipient)

Lesley Ramirez is a fourth-year transfer student at UCLA double majoring in English and labor and workplace studies. She is also part of the UCLA Law Fellows 2021 cohort. Her research examines how immigrant workers who are not members of worker centers or unions access benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her findings show a difference between strategies on how men and women access benefits. In addition, her findings reveal a networking system among workers that shows methods of organizing that can prove important to worker centers and unions.

Renaissance Award

A former CSW Research Affiliate, Dr. Myrna Hant received her PhD in Higher Education from UCLA. 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.

Eva Zapata

Eva Zapata is an interdisciplinary scholar and practitioner involved in research and innovative artistic projects at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. After years working in Russian media, Eva relocated to the United States and now focuses on topics in theatrical production, design, and development. For over ten years she has been working with experimental costuming, incorporating wearable electronics and non-traditional materials into garments for live and multimedia performance. She will continue her research on cognitive effects of technologically modified performance as an MFA student at UCLA next year.

Black Feminism Initiative (BFI) Graduate Fellowships

The CSW Black Feminism Initiative (BFI) has established two fellowships to support intellectual work that centers black feminist frameworks of analysis: The Alisa Bierria Graduate Fellowship in Black Feminist Research and the Mariame Kaba Graduate Fellowship in Black Feminist Research. In the tradition of abolitionist feminist activism and labor, the BFI Graduate Fellowships seek to advance black feminist work on any topic with a focus on scholarship that interrogates historical and ongoing regimes of violence, enclosure, and captivity and offers original insights for conceiving of freedom, redress, abolition, and refusal.

Akua Agyen

Akua Agyen is a joint PhD/MSW student in the Department of Anthropology and the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. Akua earned a Master of International Relations from Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Bachelor of Arts degree at Yale University. Her current research examines how institutions tasked with care enact violence in the lives of Black womxn and girls. Through ethnography, feminist science and technology studies, and Black feminist theory, their research connects historical legacies of medico-legal racism in the US to enduring institutional racism in contemporary hospital-based sexual assault care. With lessons learned from their experiences as a birth doula and sexual assault crisis counselor, Agyen conducts research with the aim of reimagining models of care that are Black feminist, queer, and abolitionist.

Victoria Copeland

Victoria Copeland is a third-year doctoral student in social welfare. Her research currently explores the use of data and surveillance within the “child welfare” system. More specifically, she is interested in how multi-system data infrastructures, predictive analytics, and surveillance in decision-making processes impact Black families and communities. She uses the intersection between Black Feminist thought, abolitionist praxis, and critical technology studies as a point of entry.

Kimberly Fuentes

Kimberly Fuentes is a second-year Master of Social Welfare Student with a focus on global health and social services at the Luskin School of Public Affairs. Prior to starting her MSW program, Kimberly received her Bachelor’s degree with honors from UC Santa Barbara. Her thesis explores the compounded criminalization that Black sex workers face, and identifies individual and community resilience factors used to transcend the violence of the carceral state. Through art-based photo-elicitation, her project seeks to explore the impact of criminalizing a means of survival, anti-Black racism within the informal economy, and collective care as a means of resistance within a Black feminist framework.