Category: Award Spotlight

The SWS Feminist Mentoring Award was established in 1990 to honor SWS Members who are outstanding feminist mentors. While the word “mentoring” is commonly used to describe a faculty-student relationship, this award has shown the breadth of ways that feminists do mentoring. In establishing the award, SWS recognized that feminist mentoring is an important and concrete way to encourage feminist scholarship.

This year’s Feminist Mentoring Award Subcommittee included Saida Grundy (Subcommittee Chair,) Emily S. Mann, Heather Laube, and LaToya Council. The Subcommittee chose Dr. Mindy Fried as the recipient of the SWS 2024 Feminist Mentoring Award

Mindy Fried, Ph.D., MSW, is an applied sociologist with over 25 years of experience conducting research, teaching, and conducting policy analysis on organizational and workplace issues. She is co-founder and Principal of Arbor Consulting Partners, a small research consulting group based in Boston, Massachusetts. Mindy is also the Executive Director of Hoopla Productions, a nonprofit organization that produces arts events aimed at building community across the divides of race, class, culture and immigrant status. She co-founded Jamaica Plain Porchfest in 2014, and is currently focusing on productions about immigrant stories, music and dance. Most recently, she collaborated with a youth nonprofit, ZUMIX, which culminated in a live staged, intergenerational production at Boston’s City Hall Plaza called Open Your Heart:  Immigrant Stories and Music from Boston and Beyond.  Mindy also founded and co-produced an award-winning podcast about caregiving called The Shape of Care, which features caregivers and paid care workers, creators of innovative programs, and activists organizing nationally to mobilize care workers and implement a progressive national care agenda. She is currently developing a new podcast about growing older called Next Chapters, which is affiliated with Our Bodies Ourselves Today. Mindy has taught sociology courses on gender, work and public policy at universities throughout Boston, including MIT, Brandeis and Tufts. Her published books include Caring for Red:  A Daughter’s Memoir (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), and Taking Time:  Parental Leave Policy and Corporate Culture (1998). Mindy earned her Masters and Doctoral degrees in sociology from Brandeis University; and an MSW from Syracuse University, with a focus on Community Organizing and Social Policy Planning. In her spare time, she loves to take long (fast) walks, dance and sing, eat ice cream, play piano, knit, read, hang out, and take care of her “grand-cats”.

Here are some highlights from Mindy Fried’s nomination materials that were submitted by Chloe Bird, with support from Josephine Beoku Betts, Mary Bernstein, Tristan Bridges, Wendy Christensen, Tricia Bruce, Kimberly Fox, Bandana Purkayastha, Jax Gonzalez, LaToya Council, Rodica Lisnic, Nili Gesser, Anneliese Hager Preciado, and Sela Harcey.

In addition to her work supporting SWS members interested in applied sociology as a career, Mindy has supported SWS members interested in building skills as public sociologists. For example, she has taught multiple blog writing workshops at SWS Winter meetings; she taught an (invited) all-day workshop at the ASA summer meeting in Montreal; and she has provided hands-on support to academic sociologists working on transforming their scholarly writing for public/popular audiences. Most recently, at the 2020 SWS Winter meeting, Mindy taught a workshop on creating a podcast as public sociology, in which she shared her own work as producer of The Shape of Care podcast and featured three sociologists of color who produce powerful sociologically inspired podcasts.

Mindy has mentored sociologists who are interested in applied careers at all stages of the process, including those who are: deciding whether to pursue an applied career, researching possible job opportunities, transforming CVs into resumes, writing cover letters, interviewing for potential jobs, and negotiating salaries and working conditions. It is not surprising that Mindy has influenced hundreds of sociologists, including graduate students and academics who are exploring a move to – or have accepted offers to work in applied jobs. As such, she is an exemplary mentor.

In all of the work Mindy does, she is committed to supporting and encouraging her colleagues to take risks in exploring new career options, and in sharing their knowledge and skills as public sociologists. She is committed to the advancement of sociologists representing diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, and gender identities, and has worked tirelessly in her many initiatives to support women of color.

We hope you will join us in congratulating Mindy Fried and that you will make plans to join us for the 2024 Winter Meeting. Please register here for the 2024 Winter Meeting where you will have the opportunity to attend this celebration.

The Honorary Feminist Sociologist Distinction, established in 2021, is presented annually to honor the contributions of feminists who are not sociologists to the field of Feminist Sociology. This initiative recognizes the inherent interdisciplinary character of feminist theory and praxis and how it has been fundamental to the development of feminist sociology. The work by feminists like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Maria Lugones, to name just a few, has been of great influence to our field by revealing nuances and complexities of social processes from angles that sometimes escape sociological research. This award offers an “Honorary Feminist Sociology Distinction” to scholars and activists that have allowed Feminist Sociology to grow and foregrounds the cross-disciplinary links of Feminist Sociology.

The President-Elect selects the annual recipient of the Honorary Feminist Sociologist Distinction and invites the awardee to participate at the SWS Winter Meeting to foster constructive interdisciplinary relationships among feminists who are devoted to advancing gender and sexual justice as well as dismantling intersecting systems of oppression.

The 2024 SWS Honorary Feminist Sociologist Distinction is awarded to Dr. Maria Mayerchyk, selected by S.L. Crawley, SWS President-Elect. Past awardees include Dr. Ochy Curiel (2022) and Dr. Sharon Harley (2023).

Dr. Maria Mayerchyk is a feminist academic and activist from Ukraine. She has a double affiliation as a Deputy Professor of Social Anthropology at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences (Germany) and a Senior Research Associate at the Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

In 2003, she obtained a Candidate of Sciences degree (= PhD) in History, specializing in Ethnology. Later, she held an academic position at the University of Alberta (2019-2020) and was a visiting scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (2012), Lund University (2019), the University of Greifswald (2022-2023), as well as held postdocs at the University of South Florida (2007-2008) and the University of Alberta (2008-2009). Maria’s research interests include a decolonial perspective on gender, sexuality and body, queer and feminist movements and epistemologies of Eastern Europe, diaspora and migration studies, and folklore and traditional knowledge.

She is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the refereed open-access journal Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies (2015-now), which provides a platform for feminist knowledge production and encourages debates on socially important issues related to Eastern Europe among global scholarly and activist communities.

In 2011–2014, she was the principal investigator on the Gender, Sexuality, and Power project supported by the Open Society Foundation.

Maria has authored/edited seven books, numerous journal articles, and special issues. Her current monograph, Coloniality of the Indecent: Erotic Folklore in the Modern Design of Sexuality, as well as her previous book Ritual and the Body: Ukrainian Rites of Passage (first published in 2011), are being translated into English.

Maria’s articles have been translated into Chinese, Croatian, English, Georgian, German, Polish, and Russian. Her most recent publications, co-authored with Olga Plakhotnik, include “Pride Contested. Geopolitics of Liberation at the Buffer Periphery of Europe” (Lambda Nordica, 2023), “What is Guarded in Toilets? On Transphobia, Citizenship and Militarisation” (Femina Politica, 2023) and “Uneventful Feminist Protest in Post-Maidan Ukraine: Nation and Coloniality Revisited” (Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues, ed. by R. Koobak, M. Tlostanova, & S. Thapar-Björkert. Routledge, 2021).

Maria will be a participant on a 2024 SWS Winter Meeting Plenary: Transnational Feminist Resistance to “Anti-Gender” Politics and Authoritarianism which will be on Friday, January 26, 2024 from 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm.

We hope you will join us in congratulating Dr. Maria Mayerchyk, and that you will make plans to join us for the 2024 Winter Meeting Awards Banquet and Reception to be held on Saturday, January 27. Please register here for the 2024 Winter Meeting where you will have the opportunity to attend this celebration.

The SWS Global Feminist Partnership Program (GFPP) establishes collaborations with feminist and women-centered organizations and non-governmental organizations across the globe. The GFPP reflects the commitment of SWS to foster activism and advocacy for and by women, support research by women and on gender issues, increase organizational inclusiveness, and build organizational strength by increasing our visibility in the discipline of sociology, on campuses, and in society. The GFPP is an initiative of the International Committee.

The 2024 Global Feminist Partner is Dr. Olga Plakhotnik.

Dr. Olga Plakhotnik (no pronouns) is a Chair in Ukrainian Cultural Studies at the University of Greifswald and a PI of the team project “Un)Disciplined: Pluralizing Ukrainian Studies—Understanding the War in Ukraine.” The project is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research and aims at methodological pluralization and networking of Ukrainian studies and related areas in Germany and internationally.

Olga’s educational and professional trajectory has been quite twisted across disciplines, countries and continents, languages, and academic traditions. Olga’s first Ph.D. was completed in Social Philosophy (2004) at the National Aerospace University in Kharkiv (Ukraine), where Olga taught and did research in critical epistemologies and feminist/ queer pedagogies. Olga was a recipient of prestigious fellowships such as the Fulbright Scholar Fellowship at the University of South Florida, the IREX Fellowship at the University of Urbana-Champaign, the DAAD Fellowship at Free University (Berlin), Central European University in Budapest, and the Swedish Institute Fellowship at the Linkoping University. Simultaneously, Olga was involved in intense academic-activist work and community service in Ukraine. Several summer schools for educators, activists, and artists were organized to discuss the topics of gender, feminism, queer, and others. The largest was an international three-year project, “Gender, Sexuality, and Power,” supported by the Institute of Open Society and aimed at developing teaching excellence in gender and queer studies.

Then Olga’s professional interest turned to sociology. Olga entered a doctoral program at the Open University (UK) and completed it in 2019. The doctoral dissertation entitled “Imaginaries of Sexual Citizenship in Post-Maidan Ukraine: A Queer Feminist Discursive Investigation” was defended with distinction. Four years after the defense, it was downloaded from the university website more than 600 times. Olga intended to rework it into a book manuscript provisionally titled “Sexuality, Citizenship, and War” and received an advanced contract for it from McGill-Quinn University Press. Although this task was partially completed in 2020-2022, during Olga’s postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta, the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led to the termination of the book project. Meanwhile, some parts of the dissertation appeared in the journals Feral Feminisms (2022), Qualitative Research in Psychology (2023), and several book collections. Olga’s recent research project at the University of Greifswald explores discursive mechanisms of feminist and queer subjectivation using the concept of “border” as both a locality and a method.

Another part of Olga’s scholarship, completed in co-authorship with Maria Mayerchyk, focuses on theorizing feminist and LGBT discourses in Ukraine and Eastern Europe from the perspective of coloniality. Olga and Maria’s texts on this topic were published in the books Feminist Circulations between East and West, edited by Annette Bühler-Dietrich (Frank & Timme Verlag, 2019), Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice, edited by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova & Suruchi Thapar-Björkert (Routledge, 2021), and Lambda Nordica journal (2023). Recently Olga and Maria started a new research project seeking to theorize a specific entanglement of race/ ethnicity and gender in the case of war refugees from Ukraine in Germany.

Olga and Maria are founders and editors-in-chief of the refereed journal Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies launched in 2016. The journal publishes papers in English, Russian, and Ukrainian on a wide range of topics with strong feminist and/or queer-theoretical positionality. The editors state: “We consider feminism broader than mere debates on women’s rights and gender equality, and we see queer theory as more than LGBT studies. We take feminism and queer theory as a tool for critical analysis of the implications of power, knowledge, and politics through which various “others” are constructed and naturalized, and global and local regimes of inequalities are established and maintained.”

Olga will be a participant on a 2024 SWS Winter Meeting Plenary: Reproductive, Gender, and Sexual Justice in a Non-binary Utopia which will be on Friday, January 26, 2024 from 11:45 am – 1:15 pm.

We hope you will join us in congratulating Olga Plakhotnik and that you will make plans to join us for the 2024 Winter Meeting. Please register here for the 2024 Winter Meeting where you will have the opportunity to attend this celebration.

The 2024 SWS Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Award Winner is Dr. Ghassan Moussawi. Thank you to the SWS Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Subcommittee that was comprised of Jaime N. Hartless (Chair), Jill Bystydzienski, Margarita Levine, and Sara Tyberg. The SWS Distinguished Lectureship was founded in 1985 as a way of recognizing members whose scholarship employs a feminist perspective, and of making this feminist scholar available to campuses that are isolated, rural, located away from major metropolitan areas, underfunded and without the resources needed to invite guest speakers, and/or characterized by hostility to feminist scholarship. A key goal of the program is to provide a feminist voice on campuses where such a perspective is unusual and/or unwelcome. Please note that the Lectureship originally carried the name of Cheryl Allyn Miller, but now there is a separate Cheryl Allyn Miller Award.

Ghassan Moussawi is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender and Women’s Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies in Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is also an affiliate of the Department of Anthropology, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Global Studies, and the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program. His research lies at the intersections of transnational gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial feminisms, affect studies, and queer of color critique, with keen attention to nation and empire. Professor Moussawi’s book Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Temple University Press, 2020) won the 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association and the 2021 ASA Sociology of Sexualities’ Distinguished Book Award. In it, he examines queer strategies of survival amidst everyday life violence and disruptions. He has also published multiple award-winning peer-reviewed articles and chapters, which have appeared in Feminist Formations, Sociological Forum, The Sociological Review, Gender, Place & Culture, Sexualities, Mobilities, and Research Handbook on Intersectionality (Edited by Mary Romero), among others. Professor Moussawi earned his PhD in Sociology from Rutgers University. He was recognized with the 2022 ASA Sociology of Sexualities’ Early Career Award, was a Woodrow Wilson (now Institute for Citizens and Scholars) Dissertation Fellow in Women’s Studies, and has received multiple awards for his teaching.

As noted in his nomination materials collected by Victoria Reyes:

• Dr. Moussawi through his scholarship, teaching, mentoring and service has been fearlessly pushing back against all forms of injustice within academia in the service of dismantling mostly unchallenged and harmful assumptions around queer of color subjectivities in the North American academia. … Dr. Moussawi is an inspirational scholar whose work and presence in academic spaces I inhabit has pushed my own scholarship to be more critical and justice oriented and this is a scholarly voice that needs to be centered and amplified within and beyond organization such as SWS. I extend my unreserved support for Dr. Moussawi’s nomination for SWS Feminist Lecture Award.
• I wanted to remark on his excellence as a mentor. Ghassan is a fierce advocate for his students, reaching outside of his university even, to create the sort of intellectually supportive milieu for them to explore their ideas, and for them to grow. He has asked me to serve as an external person on two of his students’ committees, both of whom work on India. Ghassan’s deep sense of obligation to his students is remarkable. He is committed to their research projects, quietly nurturing but also strongly directing, to help them successfully navigate their first large research project. I have learned so much about mentoring through watching Ghassan work with his students.
• When [Dr. Moussawi] began to mentor and eventually advise me, I found a sense of belonging. Along with his other advisees, I became a part of a feminist academic community. [Dr. Moussawi] has always shown me kindness, generosity, encouragement, and incredible academic guidance. I have never experienced nor seen such a dedicated advisor and mentor in all my eleven years in higher education. Not only does he support my understandings and uses of radical feminist and queer theory and methods in my research (something that I struggled to find in my department prior to his support) but he always gives me the space, respect, and time I need to care for and prioritize the other important things in my life, like my community organizing, health, and financial stability. Observing and learning from his feminist pedagogy has helped me to become a better supporter and educator to those who I now mentor and teach.

We hope you will join us in congratulating Dr. Ghassan Moussawi, and that you will make plans to join us for the 2024 Winter Meeting Awards Banquet and Reception to be held on Saturday, January 27. Please register here for the 2024 Winter Meeting where you will have the opportunity to attend this celebration.

The Undergraduate Social Action Award is given annually to recognize students or a team of students making a substantial contribution to improving the lives of women in society through activism. SWS initiated this award in 2004. The work honored by this award is central to the SWS goal to foster activism for women. SWS recognizes that action “for women” does not mean that the work was done “with women” or even “by women.” Substantial need exists for social action working with working with men, boys, LGBTQ communities and other groups where change will benefit women and can be understood as feminist action. Therefore, SWS recognizes work done in this spirit regardless of applicant gender identity.

A special thank you to the SWS 2024 Undergraduate Social Action Subcommittee: Evonnia Woods (Co-Chair), Heather Hlavka (Co-Chair), Kristy Kelly and Nicole Bedera. SWS is pleased to announce that V Mancebo is the 2024 Undergraduate Social Action Awardee. Thank you to Sophia Boutilier for nominating V Mancebo for this prestigious award.

Born and raised in Queens, New York, V Mancebo is a first-generation Dominican American studying psychology and sociology at Stony Brook University. With their education, V plans to pursue a career as a social worker and researcher to better serve their community. They strive to make resources available and easier to navigate throughout New York City and are passionate about making the medical system more equitable for low-income communities. V has previously volunteered with MinKwon Center for Community Action and Asia Initiatives to bring resources to local and global communities. They have interned with the NYC Commission on Gender Equity where they conducted research on street harassment and worked to increase awareness on issues affecting LGBTQ+ youth and the transgender community. V is currently a resident assistant, a member of Stony Brook’s campus emergency response team (a campus organization dedicated to maintaining community safety through campus-wide trainings about disaster preparedness and on-site activations during campus events), and serves as vice president of Stony Brook University’s chapter of Out in STEM (a national organization dedicated to increasing access and representation for the LGBTQ+ community in STEM careers and studies). Their involvement in student life helps to bring resources to the campus community and to the LGBTQ+ students of Stony Brook. Through their research on the intersectionality of anti-fat discrimination and rape culture, V hopes to minimize the marginalization of fat people in the medical system and create equitable spaces for other marginalized communities.

As noted in the nomination materials collected and submitted by Dr. Sophia Boutilier:

• V has always been an active and contributing member and is a great vice president. We reestablished our Stony Brook chapter last semester and as a new organization on campus, we have a lot to do in bringing awareness about the lack of queer diversity in STEM. Last semester, V was a very active member of oSTEM. They attended all of our general body meetings, always participated in our discussions, and often helped out during larger events. This semester, as vice president, V has continued developing our organization by collaborating with other campus organizations with events to raise awareness for queer topics and they continue to further discussions amongst our general members to create a positive atmosphere and community both in the organization and on campus. V helps to facilitate deep, difficult, discussions about literature about LGBTQ+ people and the controversial, negative impacts they pose to the queer community overall. V is very passionate about queer diversity and has been achieving the goals we have set out for the organization and connecting with people on and off campus in an effort to increase awareness and aid to those out in STEM.
  • Raisa Rahman, Member of oSTEM, Student at Stony Brook University
• V worked as a Policy & Programs intern at the NYC Commission on Gender Equity (CGE) during the summer of 2023, working on the Safety portfolio, which covers issues at the intersection of gender equity and safety, including gender-based violence and access to safe public spaces. V supported the Policy and Programs team in a number of ways, including drafting agendas ahead of key meetings, summarizing and circulating meeting notes and next steps, and researching and drafting original knowledge products related to gender equity and safety, including the challenges faced by gender expansive people during migration. They consistently performed at a high level and were an engaged, thoughtful, and helpful team member, and made many positive contributions to the office during their tenure with CGE.
  • Sarah Milner-Barry and Melanie Weniger, New York City Commission for Gender Equality

We hope you will join us in congratulating V Mancebo, and that you will make plans to join us for the 2024 Winter Meeting Awards Banquet and Reception to be held on Saturday, January 27. Please register here for the 2024 Winter Meeting where you will have the opportunity to attend this celebration.

Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) established The Cheryl Allyn Miller Award for graduate students and recent PhDs. working in the area of women and paid work: employment and self-employment, informal market work, illegal work. The award honors the late Cheryl Allyn Miller, a sociologist and feminist who studied women and paid work. The 2024 Cheryl Allyn Miller Award Winner is Sejin Um.

Thank you to the Cheryl Allyn Miller Award Subcommittee that included Laura Bunyan (Chair),  Asmita Aasaavari, Rianka Roy, and Sarah A. Robert.

Sejin Um is a PhD candidate in sociology at New York University, where she works on topics in gender inequality, organizations, work, and family. Her dissertation uses 126 in-depth interviews to examine how young women and men employed in large corporations in Korea evaluate their jobs and develop different career pathways and understandings of success. In another line of work with others, she studied American families’ experiences and coping strategies during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sejin holds an MA degree in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice from University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and a BA in International Studies from Korea University, Seoul.

Sejin’s article, “The Militarized Workplace: How organizational culture perpetuates gender inequality in Korea” is part of her dissertation research. The paper examines the experiences of young women who leave full-time employment at large corporations in Korea early in their career, even in the absence of motherhood responsibilities. She demonstrates three distinct organizational features that shaped their decision to quit, synthesizing these aspects into the framework of the “militarized workplace.” The notion of the militarized workplace illuminates how everyday organizational culture and practices of large Korean firms are embedded in and operate within military discipline and how gender inequality is perpetuated in the process. The notion not only helps understand the high levels of gender inequality in Korea, but also appreciate the role of external institutions, such as male conscription and the military, in shaping organizational culture and outcomes.

We hope you will join us in congratulating Sejin Um, and that you will make plans to join us for the 2024 Winter Meeting Awards Banquet and Reception to be held on Saturday, January 27. Please register here for the 2024 Winter Meeting where you will have the opportunity to attend this celebration.

For more information on The Cheryl Allyn Miller Award, please visit: socwomen.org/awards/cherylallynmilleraward/.

SWS Congratulates the 2023-2024 ASA Minority Fellowship Awardees Sponsored by SWS –
Clark Brinson and Faith Deckard

Clark Brinson
Graduate Institution: Emory University
Sociologists for Women in Society MFP

Clark Brinson is a PhD candidate in sociology at Emory University where she also earned her MA. She earned her BA in psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research focuses on inequality, social psychology, and the needs and experiences of queer communities and communities of color. Brinson’s dissertation, Planning Our Futures: A Qualitative Study of Family Formation Goals among Black Queer Women, examines family formation desires among Black queer-identified women living in Atlanta. Using intersectionality theory as a guiding framework, the study explores how Black queer women navigate both disadvantage and privilege during the family planning process through differences in sexual orientation, class position, and gender expression. This project applies mixed methods, using interview data with 54 Black queer women and survey data from the National LGBTQ+ Women’s Community Survey, to examine challenges in family planning among Black queer southern women. Brinson’s work aims to advance science and support organizations advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive justice, and racial justice. She has received the James Weldon Johnson Institute Dissertation Completion Grant and has been involved with the Coalition of Graduate Sociologists and the Black Graduate Student Association at Emory University. Brinson also recently completed her tenure as a Research Fellow for Justice Work, an organization that focuses on advancing equity and justice through community interventions, research, and political advocacy. In her free time, she enjoys trying new vegan recipes, hiking, and going to the beach.

Faith Deckard
Graduate Institution: University of Texas at Austin
Sociologists for Women in Society MFP

Faith Deckard is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her BA in Biology at Trinity University and her MA in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin where she was a McNair Scholar. Her areas of interests include crime, law, and deviance, population health, support networks, and debt and poverty. Her dissertation Bonded: How Commercial Bail Entangles Families through Money and Risk examines how “kin and friends” inadvertently become involved in carceral surveillance and the punishment systems through the processes of bail and bail bonds. Deckard was a Population Research Fellow (NICHD Recipient) at the University of Texas at Austin and currently serves as a graduate research assistant in the Life HD Lab where she has been able to combine her interests in biology and sociology to look at how racial inequality impacts health disparities. She also received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Deckard continues to help support minority scholars by organizing workshops on promoting self-care and applying for external funding. When she has free time, she loves to on new adventures with friends. This has led to her picking up bouldering, short hikes, and attending comedy and improv shows.

SWS Congratulates all of the 2023 – 2024 American Sociological Association (ASA) Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Fellows!

To view the 2023-2024 Minority Fellowship Program Fellows, please visit: https://www.asanet.org/diversity-equity-inclusion/minority-fellowship-program/2023-2024-minority-fellowship-program-fellows/?hilite=MFP.

For more information on the Minority Fellowship Program’s (MFP), please visit:  https://www.asanet.org/diversity-equity-inclusion/minority-fellowship-program/.

Thank you to our SWS liaisons to the ASA Minority Fellowship Program, Chaniqua Simpson and Andrea Gómez Cervantes.