We are very pleased to announce the 2022 recipient of the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award: Ashley Barry.
First, we want to introduce this award and Vivien Hartog. Then Ashley’s advisor, Lisa Diedrich, will introduce Ashley.
This award is named in honor of Vivien Hartog, a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate certificate student who died before she could complete her Ph.D. in Sociology. It goes to the graduate student instructor we think most exemplifies Vivien’s lifelong commitments to activism, teaching, and learning. Here’s a description of Vivien written by her family that captures something of the kind of person we are honoring with this award:
“In Vivien Hartog’s 55 years, she went through more identities than most could imagine. An incomplete list would include: rebellious daughter; actress in training; young mother, wife (3 times); scientologist; scourge of scientology; business woman; domestic help in a hotel; undergraduate; radical feminist and lesbian; graduate student in sociology and women’s studies. At every point she both threw herself into her new identity and at the same time, remained herself. And one way that she always remained herself was in her commitment to social justice and to human rights. She remade herself regularly, but she always understood her remaking as struggles on a larger stage. Particularly in her last decade, she saw her life through the lens of an international women’s movement.”
Professor Lisa Diedrich on Ashley Barry:
I am delighted to tell you about this year’s winner of the Vivien Hartog Graduate Student Teaching Award, Ashley Barry. Ashley’s dissertation, “In/Sane on Screen,” is a cultural study of psychiatry and mental illness in film. She explores mad tropes and figures in film to understand how madness functions symptomatically within larger capitalist and ableist structures and intersecting with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Ashley has a wealth of experience teaching for both the Writing Program and WGSS, and she has also worked as a Writing Center Tutor, where she has a reputation as an incredibly effective and supportive tutor. Having observed Ashley teach, I can say that her pedagogical excellence is manifold: from the conceptual framework and design of her classes to the varieties of in-class and online exercises she has students do to her care for and attention to her students’ needs.
This past year, she has developed and taught a topics course for WGSS that connects to her research and introduces students to the emergent academic field of Mad Studies, as well as to mental health and Mad Pride activism, including the contemporary consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement. It is not hyperbole to say that she received rave reviews for her teaching this course. On her evaluations, students were universally effusive about the class and Ashley. She was lauded for being “extremely effective,” “knowledgeable,” and “innovative” in her teaching, as well as “extremely understanding,” “super accommodating,” “flexible,” and “very forgiving” in her engagement with her students. It is clear from the evaluations that Ashley’s course and her pedagogy has positively impacted students’ lives.
Ashley is active and well-connected on campus and in the wider Long Island community. As an undergraduate at Stony Brook, she worked with the LGBTQ* Services Center, completed the Office of Multicultural Affairs’ Social Justice League Certificate Program, interned at the Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic, and was selected as a member of the Steering Committee of the Long Island Unity Collective. Since entering our graduate program, she has continued to engage in social justice work, especially in relation to improving and expanding accessibility on campus. As part of this disability justice work, she is currently a member of the GSO’s Disability Advocacy/ADA Working Group. She is a leader in WGSS and beyond. This year, Ashley was chosen as one of the inaugural cohort of Inclusion Diversity Equity and Access (IDEA) graduate fellows at Stony Brook and has been working on a project to expand wellness and inclusion within graduate education. She (along with Desi Self) was selected as the WGSS graduate student representative and served in that role as the campus went into lockdown and began teaching remotely. They were instrumental in creating programming focused on supporting best practices in online pedagogy, as well as social gatherings on zoom that helped counter isolation among graduate students. Everything she does—research, teaching, and advocacy—is concerned with making spaces more welcoming and inclusive. For all these reasons, we think Ashley represents well the spirit and commitments of Vivien Hartog.
Congratulations, Ashley!