Category: Member News

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.