Jeanette Blanchette, WGSS BA ’20: I believe voices like mine need to be heard & represented

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Jeanette Blanchette offers moving words about her experience as a Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies minor and about her plans for the future:

During my time at WGSS, I was fortunate to learn from a vast array of intelligent and passionate professors who truly loved their craft. I was able to learn more about the diverse communities around me and grow as a unique individual in this world. I am also very grateful to my peers who always created a diverse, fun, and comfortable learning environment where we all could discuss our thoughts freely. Words can never truly express the amount of knowledge and perspective that I have gained throughout my time as a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor. I will never forget how I started with WST 103 to become a minor and discuss my research on body politics in WST 408. Upon graduating Summa Cum Laude, my goals for the future are to obtain a MA/Ph.D. in either political science or international relations. I hope to become either a foreign affairs or public policy analyst and pursue a career in public service. I believe voices like mine need to be heard and represented. That being said, I wish my fellow seniors all the best with their future endeavors. Congratulations to the Class of 2020!

Jeanette Blanchette, ’20.

WGSS Academic Excellence Award: Jessica Tom and Jeanette Blanchette

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The WGSS Award for Academic Excellence goes to both WGSS major, Jessica Tom, and WGSS minor, Jeanette Blanchette.

Professor Ritch Calvin presents the award to Jessica Tom:

I am very happy to announce that Jessica Tom has been awarded the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Award for Academic Excellence. Jessica is a double major in Biology and WGSS. As she has noted in class, the two majors, and the classes for each major, really draw on and activate different ways of thinking.

I have just completed reading her final essay for WST 305. In this class, we have focused on questions of epistemology and language. The assignment asked students to apply those concepts to an analysis of a contemporary, real-world issue. Being the dual major that she is, Jessica focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, the ways we have talked about it, and the ways in which language has shaped our response to it.

In another class, (WST 398 with Nancy Hiemstra), Jessica also addressed COVID-19 via a media presentation. As Prof. Hiemstra writes, “For her final project, she put together an original media piece: a photo essay on the impacts of COVID-19 shut-downs and xenophobia on restaurant businesses and undocumented immigrant workers in Manhattan’s Chinatown. She really went above and beyond, taking her own photos to use and writing eloquent, powerful text to accompany them.”

It is rewarding to see that Jessica is using the information and insight from her classes to address real-world issues.

Congratulations to Jessica on her hard work and her academic success.

Professor Nancy Hiemstra presents the award to Jeanette Blanchette:

It is an honor to present this departmental Academic Excellence Award to Jeanette Blanchette, a major in Political Science and minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. Jeanette’s excellence in academics is immediately evident in the fact that she is graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a GPA of 4.00 from Stony Brook’s Honors College. She also exemplifies excellence in her desire to always learn deeply and challenge herself.

I first met Jeanette in 2016 in my Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies course. While it was a lecture course, Jeannette immediately stood out as an especially perceptive and curious student. She was again my student in an upper-level class in 2017, and again excelled. In both classes, she frequently spoke up to make thoughtful comments and consistently turned in outstanding work. Jeanette also demonstrated great skill in independent research and analysis as a research assistant for me over the course of three semesters.

Jeanette similarly impressed other instructors in our department. As Professor Liz Montegary noted, “her work ethic is unmatched, and the quality of her writing is top-notch.” For her WST research seminar project, Jeanette wrote a paper titled “Body Politics: Anti-Abortion Legislation Throughout the Bible Belt.” Jeanette plans to continue on to graduate school in Political Science after graduation, and we look forward to seeing the paths she carves for herself.

Congratulations!

A message of feminist solidarity to the WGSS class of 2020 from doctoral students Annu Daftuar & Val Moyer

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We, Annu Daftuar and Val Moyer, would like to congratulate the WGSS class of 2020!

We started our PhD at Stony Brook in 2016, at the same time as these graduating seniors, so we have been with this group as TAs and instructors throughout their undergraduate career. These quotes resonate deeply with our own feminist worldviews and we wanted to share them with the amazing graduating cohorts as a sign of our feminist solidarity. Congratulations!

Image description: Two handwritten quotes on bright, floral backgrounds. One reads: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and be eaten alive” by Audre Lorde. The other is: “I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'” by Toni Morrison. 

WGSS Activism & Academic Excellence Award: Zach Davidson

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DRUMROLL PLEASE!!!

We will be using this space to present the 2020 WGSS Awards and acknowledge the many accomplishments of our graduating majors and minors.

The first award is for WGSS Activism and Academic Excellence presented by Professor Liz Montegary to Zach Davidson.

It is my honor to introduce Zachary Davidson as the winner of this year’s WGSS Activism and Academic Excellence Award. Zach is graduating this spring with a B.A. in Biology and a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is planning to apply to medical school this coming fall.

Zach’s decision to make WGSS a central component of his pre-med education reflects his commitment to bringing a critical cultural lens to the work of medical care. As an interdisciplinary thinker, Zach always considers the larger contexts surrounding the situations he encounters—whether hypothetical scenarios presented in the classroom or actual incidents occurring in his professional work life. This has most certainly been true during his time as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) with the Stony Brook Volunteer Ambulance Corps (SBVAC). Zach began volunteering as an EMT shortly after arriving on campus and has been a vital member of SBVAC for the past four years, assisting with the training of new EMTs and ambulance drivers and serving as the agency’s Treasurer during the 2018-19 academic year.

This past fall, Zach developed a project for the WGSS Senior Research Seminar that was inspired by his on-the-ground experiences as an EMT with SBVAC. He identified a gap in the literature and training materials available for emergency care providers serving undergraduate students. Given the ubiquity of sexual assault on college campuses, EMTs working in these settings often encounter patients who have past experiences with sexual violence (or who have recently survived some form of assault). What Zach wanted to know was what steps EMTs could take to reduce the risk of re-traumatizing survivors needing immediate care or lifesaving assistance. His senior research project resulted in a well-researched and terrifically written paper on best practices for treating sexual assault survivors in pre-hospital settings. But, even more excitingly, Zach worked with his SBVAC supervisors to develop training protocols for teaching his fellow EMTs about these standards of care. This initiative is an excellent reminder of the creative and compassionate innovations that become possible when healthcare professionals are trained in histories of gender and sexual inequities and feminist theories of carework and emotional labor.

Through his advocacy work and community service, Zach brought new perspectives – and new training initiatives – to the Stony Brook Volunteer Ambulance Corps. His distinctly feminist dedication to our campus will surely leave a lasting effect. Congratulations, Zach! On behalf of the entire WGSS department, I wish you the best of luck as you take the next steps on your medical career path!

 

Raven Dorsey, WGSS BA ’16: Sparkly magic policy doula!

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Another amazing WGSS alum has sent us a video to help celebrate the WGSS 2020 graduates. Raven Dorsey tells us about how she has worked to create “radical, positive change” since graduating in 2016. She has been on an incredible journey with many adventures, including completing a Masters of Social Work at Penn, working for the Women’s Law Project and Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, and becoming, as she puts it, a “sparkly magic policy doula”!

Like Janice Lorenzana, Raven was another recipient of WGSS’s Terry Alexander Award. Raven was a leader on Stony Brook’s Track and Field team, who received Stony Brook Athletics’s Seawolves Impact Award.

Jessica Rybak, WGSS BA ’14: My WGSS background as an asset personally & professionally

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We’re thrilled to post another video of a WGSS alum sending well wishes to the WGSS class of 2020. This one comes from Jessica Rybak, who graduated with degrees in WGSS & Art and is now in the Graduate Teacher Education Program at Portland State University training to become an elementary school teacher.

While at Stony Brook,  Jessica worked on a very ambitious project on the History of Feminism at Stony Brook, which included archival research in Special Collections and video interviews with numerous faculty and students. She created a short film on this research and presented it at URECA in 2013.

Janice Lorenzana, WGSS BA ’09: Find the thing that makes you feel empowered and excited

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We are happy to feature another amazing alum, Janice Lorenzana (WGSS BA ’09), sending a message of support to the WGSS class of 2020. Janice was the inaugural recipient of the Terry Alexander Award in WGSS, given annually to a graduating major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, who has completed the Gender, Sexuality, and Public Health track, and is interested in a career in health care and/or health advocacy. [We’ll announce this year’s winner of the Terry Alexander Award in this space soon!]. Janice now lives in Portland, Oregon and works for Basic Rights Oregon, an organization that advocates for racial justice, trans justice, and youth justice. Janice also creates sex and body positive art and has shared some of their work with us.

 

 

Aron O’Donnell, WGSS BA ’10: On working to build a more just world

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We are using this blog space to share messages from the WGSS@StonyBrook community, far and wide. Here is an inspiring message to the WGSS class of 2020 from Asher Aron O’Donnell, WGSS class of 2010.

Congratulations WGSS Class of 2020!!

My name is Asher Aron O’Donnell, WGSS class of 2010, writing to you from Oakland, California! It is a joy and pleasure both to congratulate you on your accomplishment, and to reflect on how my degree in WGSS has shaped my last decade.

I am sitting outside a laundromat, breathing through a homemade mask gifted to me from a crafty, leather-dyke seamstress friend. With each breath moving heavily across the cotton, it feels impossible to not also consider the unhappy global circumstances in which I am participating in celebrating you. Perhaps as such, it is more important than ever to mark your achievements, to slow down amidst the internal and external chaos, and to think about how your WGSS training will serve you moving forward. It is here, in the space of you dreaming up your next steps, that I arrive to share my WGSS experience and where I have gone with my degree.

Being a WGSS student profoundly affected my internal world, from my sense of self and how I relate to others, to how I began making sense of my past and my positionality in the world. I suspect WGSS students often are drawn to the program, as I was, because we sense that beneath the specific topics of each course rests a foundation of values that contradict those of the mainstream, status quo. At the time I started WGSS I didn’t have the words or concepts to articulate what was being contradicted (white supremacy, capitalism, racism, heterosexism, classism, ableism). It was an emotionally driven experience, a feeling inside that deeply resonated with what we were doing in the classroom. As I studied marginalized histories, feminist philosophies, queer literature, and honed skills in applying feminist methodologies, the values that resonated early on—social justice, lifting voices of the oppressed, body autonomy, self-definition—were nurtured and took root inside me. My experience in WGSS continues to inform my process of growth and deep healing, an ongoing work of connecting my own and others’ experiences of trauma and harm within the larger social and political structures of oppression and inequity.

My career path is driven by the values I cultivated as a WGSS student. Today I work at the University of California, San Francisco in the Division of HIV, AIDS and Global Health as a clinical research coordinator. I am heading into my fourth research study looking at how medically tailored meals provided with nutrition education by a registered dietician impact chronic disease management among food insecure people in the San Francisco Bay Area. The populations I have worked with so far include people living with HIV/AIDS and patients hospitalized due to heart failure, and the latest study I am joining will address type 2 diabetes mellitus. Last year I completed a two-year fellowship with the California HIV/AIDS Policy Research Center and published a policy brief looking at food resource utilization among people living with HIV/AIDS in Alameda County. I am currently working on two papers on the findings from these studies to be published in peer-reviewed journals.

I have the pleasure of working alongside both leaders and some of the brightest up and coming thinkers in the field of food insecurity and HIV/AIDS. More broadly, this field groups within population health, and investigators study social determinants of health in order to come up with ways to intervene to improve health outcomes among groups disproportionately experiencing health risks and poor health outcomes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines social determinants of health as the conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play that affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes. Food insecurity is defined as a lack in ability, or worry about a lack in ability, to regularly acquire enough food in socially acceptable ways to meet one’s dietary requirements. Food insecurity is the social determinant of health at the center of our research, and we look at other factors such as mental health, social support and substance use to understand health outcomes and to ascertain if our “food is medicine” intervention has an impact.

I plan to apply to MA and PhD programs in the coming year. I am motivated to continue moving up in my career addressing social inequities in the health field, an area very well suited for the critical skills I developed in WGSS. In these uncertain times, with whispers of different possible futures floating in the unpolluted air while human activity is halted, I look back and feel the strength and wisdom of my ancestors. And I look to the future, and I see you, with your ingenuity and leadership, informed by WGSS values, working to build a more just world.

WGSS @ URECA 2020

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We are proud to feature the work of several WGSS majors and minors who will participate in this year’s Undergraduate Research & Creative Activities (URECA) symposium in a virtual format beginning May 6. Each year, students taking the Senior Research Seminars for WGSS Majors and Minors (WST 407 and 408) are encouraged to also present their final research projects at URECA. Check out these amazing posters from Tathiana Piquion on “Rape Culture and African American Women in American Colleges & Universities”; Mohua Sultana on “Bollywood Films: A Substitute for Sexual Health Education in South Asian Countries”; Elizabeth Varghese on “Exploitative Power Plays in Reproduction: Forced Sterilization in the Roma Population of the Czech Republic”; and Melissa Ziegler on “Amniocentesis: Reproducing Repressing Attitudes Towards Disability.” This shows the range of important research projects our WGSS students engage in at Stony Brook.  

WGSS@SBU TV!

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Along with this blog, we have also created a WGSS@StonyBrook YouTube channel. This will allow us to post videos for #WGSSGraduation2020 and more. I’ve posted a to kick off this new space of celebration, love, and hope.

 

I also read a brief excerpt from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. These are the words I read:

“Feminism is homework. When I use the word homework, I think first of being at school; I think of being given an assignment by a teacher to take home. I think of sitting down at the kitchen table and doing that work, before I am allowed to play. Homework is quite simply work you are asked to do when you are at home, usually assigned by those with authority outside the home. When feminism is understood as homework, it is not as an assignment you have been given as a teacher, even though you have feminist teachers. If feminism is an assignment, it is a self-assignment. We give ourselves this task. By homework, I am not suggesting we all feel at home in feminism in the sense of feeling safe or secure. Some of us might find a home here; some of us might not. Rather, I am suggesting feminism is homework because we have much to work out from not being at home in a world. In other words, homework is work on as well as at our homes. We do housework. Feminist housework does not simply clean and maintain a house. Feminist housework aims to transform the house, to rebuild the master’s residence.” (7)

!Felicidades! WGSS 2020!

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We have reached out to WGSS grad and undergrad alums to help us celebrate the #WGSSGraduation2020. We’ll be posting a variety of messages in a variety of forms from our many alums. Here’s one from 3 WGSS graduate certificate alums: Dean Allbritton, Danny Barreto, and N. Michelle Murray. Dean, Danny, and Michelle received their PhDs in Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook and were Turner Fellows. They were instrumental in organizing the first graduate student conferences in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook, including one in 2009 entitled Risky Business and featuring Jasbir Puar.