Women's Studies Research Center

• Pnina Abir-Am, WSRC Resident Scholar

• TBD, Student

Description: This project explores the internationally renowned career of Carolyn Cohen, (widely known as C2) the first woman professor of Biology at Brandeis University. She pioneered the structural study of muscle proteins by X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy, among other technologies; created a research community which grew from three founders to 40 scientists; served as a role model for generations of men and women scientists; and became a spokesperson for the rights of women scientists to gender equality in and out of science. The project capitalizes on C2's Personal Papers at Brandeis University Archives which the Scholar helped organize for conservation; (see essay by The Justice, 12-6-18 on a talk the Scholar gave at WSRC on C2's career) so as to conduct archival research and oral history with C2's colleagues and mentees at and beyond Brandeis. The plan is that the Student will serve as co-author of an essay for journals in the history of science & WGS.

• Nancer Ballard, WSRC Resident Scholar

• Savannah Jackson, Student

Description: The Heroine’s Journeys and Beyond project identifies and articulates post-gendered life arcs that encompass features of both The Hero and The Heroine Journeys and values struggle as much as achievement and ongoing/ incomplete journeys as much as the reaching of destinations. The project includes an enduring short-form multi-media website-blog platform that has received more than 98,000 views from visitors in over ninety countries. See https://heroinejourneys.com.

The fall 2019 project will expand and enhance the content and reach of the established Heroine's Journeys website-blog platform, articulate a new non-gendered narrative arc and meta-arc analysis and explore grant opportunities to bring our work to women, members of the LGBTQ community, and others who face or have survived mental and physical illness, poverty, societal prejudice, or violence and whose lives or work can be enriched by new narrative life-arc paradigms. 

• Susan Eisenberg, Resident Scholar

• TBD, Student

Description: On Equal Terms Project Director Susan Eisenberg has been documenting, analyzing, and framing gender equity issues in the workplace, with a focus on the construction industry, for more than four decades. The Project is looking for a Student-Scholar Partner with an interest in how power imbalances are maintained, and strong skills in digital media or transcription to join this semester’s work which includes adding content to an interactive online exhibition (https://onequalter.ms) and an interview-based book project about women who work as high voltage lineworkers. Our approach combines solid research with the arts to impact public policy. 

• K. Melchor Hall, WSRC Visiting Scholar

• Dannie Brice, Student

Description: This book project is a fresh and nuanced look at ecofeminist possibilities where contributors challenge conventional separations between theory and practice, feminism and womanism, teaching and learning, global and local, humanity and nature, and personal and structural. In working with this project, the student would have the opportunity to suggest individuals (and possibly groups) who represent the best of ecofeminism (or ecowomanism) practice for book vignettes. Also, the student would participate in researching the opening chapter that will frame the cutting-edge anthology.

• Ruth Nemzoff, Resident Scholar

• Eliana Padwa and TBD, Students, 25 hours each

Description: We will write advice columns on Jewish life from multi-generational perspectives. We will also work on a project on how to talk about feminism and Zionism. In addition, we collaborate via email and social media for professional purposes.

• Amelia LeClair, Resident Scholar

• TBD, Student

Description: Creating a performance edition in Sibelius of Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D, one of the great larger works by a great woman for chorus, soloists and orchestra. This piece is currently only available in manuscript, and under copyright in Europe, however I have received permission to create an edition in the U.S. Once a performing edition is created, parts can be extracted and the work can finally be performed as frequently as it should be. SSP will help decipher and transcribe into Sibelius the handwriting and notation of the score.

• Susan Wilson, WSRC Resident Scholar

• Megan Catalano, Student

Description: Though her name lives on in Roxbury's Dimock Street and in the Dimock Center that still straddles that road, Susan Dimock's (1847-75) important story has been essentially unknown in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To her contemporaries in Boston of the 1870s, however, she was known as a strong, selfless pioneer in American medicine — among the first group of physicians to provide professional health care by, and for, women, and one of the finest, most respected surgeons (male or female) in Massachusetts. I am working on the first full-length biography of her life.

• Linda Pololi, Resident Scholar, Senior Scientist, WSRC Resident Scholar

• Kacy Ninteau, Student

Description: The National Initiative on Gender, Culture and Leadership in Medicine& — known as “C-Change” for culture change — is seeking an intern to help prepare and evaluate a Mentoring and Leadership program at Brandeis for medical school faculty. The student will be supporting C-Change research projects including the Mentoring and Leadership Institute.

• Phoebe Schnitzer, WSRC Resident Scholar

• TBD, Student

Description: In the current survey, undergraduates at UMass Lowell shared their experiences with pre-college sex education and their recommendations for future sex ed curricula.Our data revealed compelling gender differences, conveying young women's notable dissatisfaction . Their comments have led us to consider the proposals of feminist writers on sex education, as a context for understanding these critiques and proposing changes for future programs.  

• Karen V. Hanson,PhD.,  Director of the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center and Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University

• Samantha Leonard, Graduate Student

Description:  

•  Tatjana Meschede, Senior Scientist and Senior Lecturer, Heller School for Social Policy and Management

• Laurie Nsiah-Jefferson, Visiting Associate Professor UMass Boston; Visiting Scholar, Heller School             for Social Policy and Management

• TBD, Graduate Student

Description:   This study will examine the reciprocal relationship between wealth and health for women of color and impacts on the well-being of their children. Central to this research will be the exploration of the role of gendered racism on the relationship between maternal health disparities and wealth disparities among women of color in their reproductive age group, and their impacts on  the well-being of their children ages 0-18. We propose gendered racism as an intervening variable, explicitly underscoring the role of a specific type of racism that partially drives inequality in America, and may exacerbate the relationship between health and wealth inequities. 

•  Smriti Rao, Associate Professor of Economics and Global Studies, Assumption College; WSRC Scholar

• TBD, Graduate Student

Description:   This project seeks to evaluate i) the extent and nature of agrarian distress in India in the last decade ii) The gendered impact of this agrarian distress iii) the most useful empirical measures of agrarian distress that could be used in future research. There is a significant literature on agrarian distress in India from the mid 1990s to the mid-2000s. India's liberalization process involved changes in the extent of government support for agriculture from price controls and input subsidies, to trade protection. Combined with larger shifts in global markets, this shift in policy led to a slowdown in agricultural output, yield, and employment growth. Numerous field studies pointed to rising indebtedness and losses in income for marginal farmers with un-irrigated farmland in particular. The tragic phenomenon of farmer's suicides did bring some public attention to agrarian distress, at least in part contributing to the development of India's rural employment guarantee scheme, which was designed to provide a safety net to rural agricultural workers. Since the mid 2000s there has been an increase in overall agricultural growth, measured in terms of agricultural output. However, there are sharp regional differences in the extent of recovery, and a continuing, perhaps even accelerating, decline in agricultural employment.

1.It is thus unclear where and how and to what extent processes of 'cascading downwards' continue.

2. It is even more unclear exactly what the gendered dimensions of these impacts are. Thus far, the main empirical trend appears to be a decline in the labor force participation rate of women from marginal farmer households.

3. Last but not least, this literature is marked by uneven empirical analysis. It is unclear what empirical measures of agrarian distress should be employed by future research, because there has not been a systematic evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of different indicators of distress used in this literature. The goal of this project is to examine the literature on agrarian distress in India with a focus on these three themes.