WGS minor Karnika Mehrotra, former graduate liaison and WGS teaching fellow Maya Nitis, and WGS research fellow Alexandra Lossada received a Gender and Racial Justice Scholars Research Award from JHU’s Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commemoration.

With her project “Quantifying Disparities in Access to Women’s Health Services in Baltimore” (mentored by Katrin Pahl), Karnika seeks to quantify how accessible women’s health services are in certain neighborhoods of Baltimore. Using maps drawn on the basis of racial segregation, she will look at various factors that affect the services’ accessibility. Overall, this will expose the intersection of women’s healthcare inaccessibility and race.

Maya will conduct research on anti-discrimination initiatives in local institutions of higher education for her project “Decolonizing Knowledge in Pandemic Times” (mentored by Katrin Pahl). Her study aims to assess such initiatives through interviews with participants and to build a network of anti-discrimination resources for higher education. Through a transdisciplinary lens, the study will also yield a comparative assessment of intersectional, performative, and critical epistemological frameworks that structure these initiatives.

Alexandra pursues research on “The Figure of the Interpreter between Immigration Detention Center and Contemporary Fiction” (mentored by Doug Mao). This project examines modes of resistance by bi- or multilingual ad hoc interpreters, often women and children, who appear within a new genre, the “crimmigration genre”—or works of literature that critique the criminalization of immigration. The genre allows for different ethnic women writers with connections to Mexico, Central America, Haiti, and Japan to trace intersectional histories of detention in the United States.

We wish the three of them much success with their research and look forward to the presentation of their findings in March 2022!

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