Women's Studies Research Center

• Nancer Ballard, WSRC Resident Scholar

• Savannah Jackson, Student

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.

• Helen Berger, WSRC Resident Scholar

• Sam Kleper, Student

This project is an examination of the response of the majority of contemporary Pagans, who are politically liberal, feminists, and environmentalists, to a subset within their religion that is helping to populate and provide symbols and rituals to the alt-right. The Scholar’s research focuses on the activities of the alt right, its use of Heathen symbols and images, and the responses of contemporary Pagans. The Scholar and Student  would work together to monitor online sites, read relevant news articles and academic sources, organize the data, and think through conceptualizing this work for publication.

• Linda Bond, WSRC Resdident Scholar

• Lydia Begag, Student 

Tragically overlooked war crimes against women are examined in Christina Lamb’s book “OUR BODIES, THEIR BATTLEFIELDS War Through the Lives of Women”. This book has inspired me to explore visual possibilities in my studio practice that would spotlight these ongoing and universal atrocities. With a Student Scholar partner, we would do further research and develop a concept for a work of art related to our findings.

• Edith Chears, WSRC Resident Scholar

• Sarah Jacob, Student 

An exploration into local millennial leaders, their brand of leadership, and the events that motivated them to rise up - to lead – and to champion a cause. Interview-based research resulting in the personal reflections and storytelling of young women’s inspiration and decisions to spearhead various causes.

• Yuri Dolan, WSRC Affiliated Faculty

• Yoo Ra Sung, Student 

This project uncovers, through archival Korean language documents, the hidden histories of activism and resistance among camptown women working as entertainers and prostitutes for the US military in South Korea since 1945. It distinguishes between the efforts of the sex workers themselves and those of broader South Korean nationalist and feminist movements against US militarism, which often are at odds with each other. While the broader movements utilize and appropriate camptown women's struggles as human evidence of US imperialism in South Korea, the sex workers themselves are not so interested in dismantling the US military empire, and have historically invested in action that improves their daily lives and conditions instead, such as the abolishment of venereal testing and quarantine facilities (colloquially known as the "monkey house"). This project traces how these women's own concerns have shaped the current state of politics and feminisms in camptowns, culminating to an ongoing lawsuit first filed against the South Korean government in 2014 for helping the US military to detain, test, and treat military prostitutes against their will. 

• Nance Goldstein, WSRC Resident Scholar

• Michelle Cheng, Student

The newsletter, “Take Charge of Your Practice”, fills an urgent, compelling need for physicians who are also leaders. They face radically different challenges and possibilities after COVID ravaged healthcare and in a world that expects more and better in inclusivity and equity. The newsletter curates the best articles from respected medical journals on the newly necessary leadership capacities for healthcare.  The research and stories in this newsletter offer insights into how other physicians have re-invented their practices, while also giving time-constrained physicians access to new ideas, information and opportunities. The newsletter aims to spark ideas for how to shape practices and their futures so they can thrive.

• Margaret Gullette, WSRC Resdident Scholar

• Vishni Samaraweera and Allison Sukay, Student 

American Eldercide--starting the from the appalling fact that 40% of the toll of US deaths come from people who were long-term care facilities--aims to express our personal and communal losses, explain the ageism that led our country to this tragic, criminal point; indict wrongs; indicate reforms. To do all this, I must first explain that national grief is warranted for those who suffered wrongful deaths. The goal is not just to prevent future eldercides, but to create a new social compact with adults aging into later life.  

Amid current vigorous efforts to include victims of racism in new social compacts, our country badly needs an improved contract of equity with older adults. This diverse group includes people of all races, ethnicities, sexualities, classes, and degrees of ability, who live long enough. Many, overlooked earlier by social-justice promises, find themselves in later life enduring additional stigmas from ageism.

• Ruth Nemzoff, WSRC Resident Scholar

• Eliana Padwa, Student and Caroline Greaney, Student

Using Jewish and other ancient texts to explore current family relationships, this book will tackle the problems and opportunities of long-distance grandparenting. Uniquely, this book will have the voices of all three generations: the grandparents, the parents, and the grandchild. Exploring grandparenting as a dynamic and varied stage of life, this text will allow grandparents space to grow as individuals. Few pieces of literature discuss multifaith and the experience of grandparents adjusting to a multicultural world. This book will close this gap through anecdotes from grandparents worldwidee and discussion of multifaith and multibackground families in America.

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

• Kacy Ninteau, Student

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

• Haley Sousa, Student

 The act of “Taking initiative”, a central component of leadership skills, is one that may present particular challenges for young women. By way of outreach and creating bonds between the WSRC Scholars and Brandeis undergraduate organizations, this project plans to develop and offer individual and group interventions designed to strengthen this crucial component of young women’s leadership capacity. In the initial phases of the project, the Student will serve as Ambassador to various campus groups addressing issues of importance to young women. The Student will interview campus organization leaders to ascertain concerns and help structure a variety of activities designed to foster initiative. With the close collaboration of WSRC Scholar Edith Coleman Chears Ph.D., a recognized professional in Organizational Leadership , the project will put in place a program of group and individual mentoring, which can be implemented remotely by way of teleconferencing techniques. Self-evaluation, description of leadership initiatives, and ratings of the supportive activities will provide assessments of the project. 

• Gowri Vijayakumar, WSRC Affiliated Faculty

• Inaara Gilani, Student

Through this project, we are working with Akkai Padmashali, a transgender activist based in Bangalore, India, to support her as she documents her life as an activist. Compiling her journeys through NGOs, activist organizations, and transnational feminist networks, as well as through her personal experiences of family, motherhood, and citizenship, makes clear how the personal is deeply intertwined with the political.

 

• Susan Wilson, WSRC Resident Scholar

• Megan Catalano, Student

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.

• Bernadette Brooten, WSRC Affiliated Faculty and Myra and Robert Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies, Emerita
• Eric Blum, Student

Description:   We know that persons could enter slavery in the Roman world through war, being kidnapped, indebtedness, being sold, selling oneself, or being born to an enslaved mother. Can one establish gender differences in any or all of these categories? The Latin word for enslaved person "serva/-us" refers to the common military practice of killing conquered men and "saving" the women and children, which certainly points to a gender difference, although military practice was likely more complex than that. For a person in dire straits, selling oneself into slavery may have seemed to be the only option for survival. Would the possibility of prostitution and sexual exploitation have hindered women from doing so? Because enslaved males were also subject to being prostituted and sexually exploited, this would not be a strict gender divide. Do we find evidence in the ancient sources that female children were sold into slavery more frequently than male children? Which pre-slavery circumstances varied by gender in a way that may have rendered individuals differently susceptible to enslavement?

We will examine sources from the Roman world (1st–4th C. CE) to try to get closer to answering these questions. They will include: high- and popular-level literature, papyri, inscriptions, and legal texts. The challenge of trying to answer such questions for this period and region is the dearth and fragmentary nature of the sources. Scholars of ancient history have learned to be both judicious with the sources and creative in their methods.  I am particularly interested in how early Christians became either enslaved or slaveholders, but that took place within the Roman world as a whole, which means that I need to examine these phenomena in the whole of society.  This project is through the Cascading Research Group grant funding.

• Debra Osnowitz, WSRC Affiliated Faculty
• Sarah Halford, Graduate Student

Description:   This study examines the work experiences and daily lives of home health aides with special attention to the role of technology in controlling and facilitating their work. The principal source of data for this project will be qualitative interviews. Other data may include documents that home health aides exchange with clients and staff at the agencies through which many work.  This study should ultimately contribute to a broader understanding of the dynamics of a low-wage feminized occupation, for which the workforce is disproportionately composed of women of color.   This project is through the Cascading Research Group grant funding.