The University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender has awarded 12 Faculty Seed Grants for projects on women, gender and sexuality, which may be structured creatively to produce the best possible end products, including publications, conferences, works of fine art, and novel research and scholarship.

The 2015 Faculty Seed Grant recipients and their projects are:

Sue Anne Bell (nursing)

Gender Mainstreaming in U.S. Disaster Preparedness and Response: A Policy-Monitoring Analysis

Using a gender mainstreaming approach, Bell will conduct a policy-monitoring analysis of U.S. disaster-planning policies. The results of this analysis will be used to identify gaps in disaster preparedness with respect to race, class, and gender; influence future policy reform; and provide a foundation for further research into a gendered approach to disaster preparedness and response.

 

Amy Chavasse (music, theatre & dance)

Sola, Dances by and for Women

Sola brings together six women choreographer/performers from across the United States to perform original works in five cities in 2014-15. As a creative enterprise launched by and for women dance artists, it confronts the limitations that exist for professional women working in the field of contemporary dance and academia. Sola is a mechanism that promotes ways to be disobedient to the dominant narrative through lively, vibrant, complicated, and luscious performance.
 

Clare Croft (dance)

Emerging Voices in Queer Dance

This grant will support a weeklong artistic residency culminating in two public dance performances, featuring work choreographed and performed by queer-identified women, men, and trans artists. “Emerging Voices” will challenge gender-constricting assumptions within the dance world and physically imagine other ways of being in the world, in motion, together.

                                         

Vanessa K. Dalton (obstetrics and gynecology)

The Impact of Method Choice on Contraception Continuation in Ghana

Although knowledge and ongoing use of modern contraception is high in Ghana, discontinuation is also high. Matching family-planning clients to the contraceptive method that best meets their needs helps ensure continuation. This study seeks to elucidate the impact of method choice and continuation among a cohort of Ghanaian women.

 

Aileen Huang-Saad (biomedical engineering)

Examining the Effect of Entrepreneurial Education Pedagogy on the Development of Women in STEM

The recent growth in entrepreneurship education (EntrEd) beyond business fundamentals and firm-creation has generated a growing interest in EntrEd and outcomes, specifically in engineering. The 2011 NSF I-CORPS program has established a core entrepreneurship curriculum that is being adopted across universities. This curriculum integrates business content with specific pedagogical approaches: on-line learning, flipped classroom, collaborative learning and problem-based learning. To date, there has been limited research in entrepreneurial pedagogy itself and what is available tends to be gender-neutral. The goal of this project is to examine how this approach to EntrEd influences the development of women in STEM.

 

Holly Hughes (Stamps School of Art & Design)

Preaching to the Perverted: A Hybrid Memoir

This hybrid memoir project will map Hughes’s experiences at the center of the “Culture Wars,” when her queer feminist work was defunded by the National Endowment for the Arts and targeted by the religious right as one of the “NEA Four.” The project has three components: a print collection built around her acclaimed but unpublished performance “Preaching to the Perverted,” an audio book, and a digital archive created at the Duderstadt Media Center.

 

Aliyah Khan (Afroamerican and African studies, English language and literature)

Sherie Randolph (AfroAmerican Studies, History)

Black Feminism Think Tank: A Symposium of the DAAS African American Studies Workshop

A one-day symposium on March 20, 2015, sponsored by the DAAS African American Workshop, explored the theoretical and political frameworks that Black feminists have posited to challenge the intersectional oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, imperialism and colonialism.

 

Julie R. Posselt (education) 

Competitiveness and Support in STEM Graduate Education: Examining Consequences of Organizational Culture for Mental Health by Gender, Race, and Sexuality

This project will study relationships among competitiveness, support, and mental health in STEM graduate education. A rigorous concurrent mixed-methods design includes (1) quantitative analyses of the tendency for female, queer, and underrepresented minority students to disproportionately bear risks of anxiety and depression associated with competitiveness and low support, and (2) qualitative analyses of experiences and notions about support held by of women in STEM doctoral programs that graduate women and underrepresented minorities at higher rates than their disciplines, nationally.

 

Gayle Rubin (anthropology, women’s studies)

Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960-90

This is a study of a gay subculture that coalesced around motorcycles and associated iconographies in the late 1940s, and, specifically, of the emergence and trajectories of these gay “leathermen” in San Francisco. Since the 1960s, this population has been closely identified with a formerly industrial and working class neighborhood undergoing a profound process of physical and social reconstruction. The leather population offers a “queer eyed” view of these urban processes. In addition, the study covers the early impact of the AIDS epidemic, and the medical frameworks in which the behaviors of these men were initially understood.

 

Robert Wyrod (women’s studies)

The Gender Question on China’s Second Continent: African Women in the New Era of Chinese Development

The goal of this project is to understand how the massive growth in Chinese development aid to sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Uganda, is affecting African women. This preliminary research will lay the groundwork for future research exploring whether Chinese aid benefits African women or, in fact, exacerbates gender inequalities.

 

Damon R. Young (screen arts and cultures)

Making Sex Public: Cinema, Sex, and the Social

Funding will support an archival research trip to complete final research for a book manuscript. Making Sex Public: Cinema, Sex and the Social analyzes the new kinds of political and allegorical significance that accrued to women’s bodies and gay, lesbian and queer sexualities as cinema began to imagine them in new ways from the late 1950s through the late 1970s. During this period, representations of and narratives about sex proliferated on French and American screens, and women’s and queer bodies and pleasures became especially charged sites of political contestation, aspiration and allegory. I demonstrate the key role cinema has played in fashioning our contemporary “imaginaries” around sex and the body.

 

Ruth Zielinski (nursing)

Implementation and Evaluation of Home-based Life-Saving Skills

Women in South Sudan suffer one of the highest maternal mortality rates worldwide. Having a skilled birth attendant improves outcomes, yet most women in South Sudan give birth at home unattended. Home Based Life-Saving Skills (HBLSS) is a community- based program that builds on women’s knowledge and tradition in a participatory manner through discussion, demonstration, and practice. This project proposes to evaluate the outcomes of the prior HBLSS training done with eight traditional birth attendants in 2013. We also propose to do advanced training for these women and HBLSS training for additional traditional birth attendants.