UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Alessandra Williams, a doctoral student in the Department of World Arts and Cultures, received a CSW Travel grant to support her research, which she presents in “Mixing Puppetry with Ethnography, part two: The ‘Fugitive’ Terms of Contemporary Indian Dance.” In the article, Williams writes about the work of Ananya Chatterjea, a choreographer who seeks to promote “a radical postmodern dance practice in which choreographers transcend cultural limitations by building solidarity with artists inquiring into the aesthetic forms of communities of color and the cultural activist research of their dancers.”

This final issue of the 2014-2015 academic year presents a range of research supported by CSW.

In “Border-Crossings between Eastand West Europe,” Renata Redford, adoctoral student in the Departmentof Italian who received the CSWJean Stone Dissertation Fellowshipin 2014, writes about how “borders,often understood as imaginary constructs,are inherently problematicand evolving sites from which toreframe thinking about belonging,”She also addresses current discoursesregarding the feminization of migrationand some writers whose workreveals a “private history of the EastEuropean female body in Italian.”

In “Inflammation and Depression: Why Do Women have a Higher Risk for Depression than Men?,” Mona Moieni presents the results of a study using endotoxin. Moieni, who is a doctoral student the Department of Psychology and received the CSW Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, Award in 2015, reports the results: “First, we found that women showed greater increases in depressed mood in response to an inflammatory challenge. This may mean that women are more sensitive to the mood changes that may accompany an increase in inflammation.”

Carolyn Abrams and Ana G. Luna received a CSW Travel Grant to give a conference presentation in 2014. Their article, “The Reality of the Researcher: Addressing Assumptions and Biases,” provides an overview of their work on researcher bias and provides some guidelines for best practices in avoiding bias in doing research on women. Both recently received Master’s degrees from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Lisa Bloom, a CSW Research Scholar, presents some work from her current book project in “Judit Hersko’s Polar Art: Anthropogenic Climate Change in Antarctic Oceanscapes.” Bloom received a CSW Tillie Olsen Grant to support her research, which examines Hersko’s “Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer,” a project that addresses climate change and notions of heroic exploration by creating a fictional narrative of a woman polar explorer in 1930s.