Faculty Research Award

"Welcoming Women: Co-Creating Communities of Refuge for Displaced Refugees"

What does "refuge" mean for women whose lives have been disrupted by conflict, war, and violence? Is it possible to feel "settled" following such events, and after migrating thousands of miles away to a new and unfamiliar country? In this talk, I share the findings from a year-long ethnographic project with displaced women and the volunteers who support them, and reflect on the kinds of experiences and value that women from refugee backgrounds bring to our communities--including Newark and the University of Delaware. I consider how a focus on "social reproduction" in our efforts to welcome migrants and refugees into our communities can benefit migrant newcomers and their citizen neighbors, alike. Together, we can imagine and strategize ways to create supportive community connections and build more just and inclusive shared worlds.

Georgina Ramsay, Ph.D., is an associate professor with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. She is a cultural anthropologist specializing in political and legal anthropology.

Ramsay's work focuses on the overarching question: What does it mean to be displaced in a world where precarity and instability increasingly seem to be the norm? Her research areas include refugees, citizenship and sovereignty, humanitarianism and human rights, exploitation and extractivism, homelessness and economic insecurity.

Her work aims to contextualize the movement of forced migrants worldwide within shared frames of experience and global complicity, thinking through how contemporary experiences of displacement reflect and reinforce long-standing structures of inequality and call into question collective futures of prosperity. Ramsay has conducted fieldwork with refugees in Australia, Uganda, and the United States, with internally displaced people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with people experiencing homelessness in the United States.

Ramsay is author of Impossible Refuge: The Control and Constraint of Refugee Futures (Routledge, 2018). She has published widely in academic journals, including Humanity, Anthropological Theory, Critique of Anthropology, Public Culture, Anthropological Quarterly, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Social Analysis, among others. Her writing has also been published in public media outlets, including Slate, The Conversation, and New Matilda. Her article, “Election Fact Check: Are Many Refugees Illiterate and Innumerate?" was selected for inclusion in The Conversation Yearbook 2016: 50 Standout Articles from Australia's Top Thinkers.

With climate change, political instability and economic precarity continuing to destabilize life around the globe, Ramsay's ongoing research continues to focus on displacement as a lens through which to link localized experiences of instability to the collective stakes of our global future. A migrant within the United States herself, Ramsay is committed to making the world—and her local community—more safe, welcoming, and receptive to all humans, regardless of their legal, political, social, and economic backgrounds.

Black young women navigate body image in the context of a complex social media environment, shaped by sociocultural context (e.g., gendered racism) and influenced by gendered racial identity development. However, Black women and girls' unique experiences have historically been underrepresented and undervalued in body image research. The goal of this study was to learn about Black young women's unique experiences related to social media and body image.

In this talk, I will discuss preliminary findings from qualitative interviews with ten U.S. Black women in their early 20s. All women identified as cisgender; four identified as straight/heterosexual and six identified as mostly straight, lesbian​ or queer. Preliminary analyses revealed several themes regarding body image and social media: (1) shifts in beauty standards related to social media (e.g., cultural appropriation of Black women's bodies and beauty ideals into mainstream beauty norms); (2) critical awareness of and resistance to unattainable beauty standards; (3) body dissatisfaction related to beauty standards; and (4) positive representation of more diverse bodies through social media.

The results suggest that some social media experiences may be specific to gendered racial identity and gendered racism, highlighting the importance of further research investigating Black young women's unique lived experiences. I will discuss these findings through the lens of intersectionality theory and sociocultural–developmental theories regarding media influences on body image. This work was conducted in collaboration with Jioni A. Lewis, Ph.D., and Brianna A. Ladd (University of Maryland).

Sophia Choukas-Bradley, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is affiliated with the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Brown University in 2008 and a Ph.D. from UNC Chapel Hill in clinical psychology in 2016.

She was an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at UD from 2020­­–2022. Choukas-Bradley's program of research examines sociocultural influences on the mental health and wellbeing of adolescents and young adults. Using a broad range of qualitative and quantitative research methods and a multidisciplinary approach, she collaborates with scholars in education, medicine, computer science, and communications.

One major goal of her work is to identify specific social media experiences that predict adaptive and maladaptive body image, mental health, and identity development. She also aims to understand how gender identities, sexual identities, and racial/ethnic identities affect body image and mental health.

Dr. Choukas-Bradley has published over 70 academic publications. Her blog, “Psychology of Adolescence: The Science of Teens, Screens, Gender, and Sexuality," is available through Psychology Today. More information about her work can be found at www.sophiachoukasbradley.com. ​

The 2018 recipient of the Mae and Robert Carter Endowment Women’s Studies Faculty Research Award was Ann V. Bell, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology, who presented her research "A Neglected Disparity: Race, Class, Gender, and the Lived Experience of Abortion" during her October 2019 lecture at UD. Bell's research explored the disconnect between statistics and women's lived experiences of abortion, asking how does the social construction of abortion and its embedded stereotypes influence how women understand and experience abortion? Furthermore, importantly, how does one's life circumstances, including race, class, and gender, shape such an experience? The standing room-only lecture was attended by students, faculty, and the UD community.

The 2017 recipient of the Mae and Robert Carter Endowment Women’s Studies Faculty Research Award was Mieke Eeckhaut, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, University of Delaware. The award supported Eeckhaut's research to investigate the association between economic conditions and long-acting contraceptive methods such as female sterilization, intrauterine devices, and implants during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. On November 1, 2018, Eeckhaut presented her research "Women's Sterilization and Contraception During the Great Recession," as the Women & Gender Studies' fall lecture series in the Trabant University Center Theatre.

The 2015 Mae and Robert Carter Endowment Women’s Studies Faculty Research Award recipient was Amanda Bullough, Ph.D., assistant professor of management in the Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware, for "Women Entrepreneurs: Resilience and Reducing Fear through Business Ownership." Building on her previous research in countries like Afghanistan, Bullough presented her newest data on women entrepreneurs' perceptions about culture and adversity, domestically (Chicago) and abroad (Pakistan), and how these perceptions not only affect their business decisions but also how entrepreneurial activity in turn affects their perceptions of adversity. Bullough's research spans entrepreneurship, leadership, organizational behavior, cross-cultural management, and international development. Her newest streams of research include entrepreneurship in war zones and under adverse conditions, global leadership, and women's entrepreneurship and leadership.