2023 Small Grant Recipients

Thelma Z. Abu
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography

"Understanding and Responding to Issues of Water Security and Gender-Based Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa"

The United Nations (UN) declared access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) a basic human right in 2010. Yet social disparities situated within power imbalances and contextual knowledge gaps impede achieving safe WASH access. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), these challenges typically affect rural and marginalized communities in urban areas. At the community level, the greatest burdens related to water and sanitation fall on women and girls responsible for providing these services. These women and girls are at risk of both physical and sexual violence when searching for WASH services or do not successfully deliver on their domestic responsibilities. In addition, women and men have unequal roles and varied levels of participation in water governance, particularly at the community level. In rare circumstances when women are involved, their participation is typically passive.

In response to inequities in WASH access, several global initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals (2000- 2015) have been implemented, however, achieving the WASH-related goals is challenging (UN, 2015). In 2015, the world transitioned to sustainable development goals (SDGs). The focus of the world today is to achieve the 17 SDG goals and 169 targets to ensure that the distribution of resources for life around the world happens equitably such that, by 2030, there is health and life for all. SDG 6 conveys the need for ensuring access to water and sanitation for all. Targets 6.1,6.2 and 6.b further address the gendered dimensions of accessing and participating in WASH decision-making. In addition, recent studies indicate the role of access to WASH in empowering women and ensuring gender equality in SSA.

This proposed research takes a feminist political ecology approach to document and investigate the WASH and empowerment narrative expressed through oral histories of women in Uganda and Ghana. This approach helps identify the points in history where things could have changed or could have been done differently– knowledge could have changed outcomes, attitudes could have changed behaviours, and practices could have changed lives. This study will enhance our understanding of WASH inequities, Gender Based Violence (GBV), and empowerment, all vital for responding to social inclusion in a changing climate. This research will further generate foundational knowledge for a long-term study on Sustainability in climate interventions in Ghana.

Jane Pryma
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology

"Slow Rights: Trauma and Disability Rights"

The 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities called for disability rights to be interpreted, globally, through a social model rather than a medical model of disability. However, disability rights, in practice, are still commonly granted based on a claimant’s medical diagnosis and implemented through a standard menu of reasonable accommodations. In the wake of COVID-19 and recent social movements for racial and gender justice, some organizations have begun to move beyond the focus on biomedical diagnoses to recognize impairments caused by social trauma like gender-based violence and housing insecurity. Approaching social trauma as disabling challenges prevailing sociolegal definitions of disability as a stable condition inherent to an individual rather than the product of an interaction between an individual body and a social environment. What makes a potentially traumatic experience disabling in some cases but not others is not easy to evaluate with the medical tools and objective measures favored by bureaucracies to efficiently “diagnose” and accommodate impairment. Developing disability rights that eschew medical diagnoses and one-size-fits-all standard accommodations takes additional time and labor. I term these rights “slow rights.” My project compares the implementation of disability rights in the United States and France from the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities through the COVID-19 pandemic asking: (1) how do universities and employers attempt to assess and manage the lasting effects of social trauma through a disability rights framework; (2) what are the consequences of responding to social injustices in this way; and (3) what sociolegal opportunities and challenges do organizations in each country face as they seek to implement a “slow rights” approach to impairment caused by social inequality?

Catherine Masud
Assistant Professor, Department of Digital Media & Design and Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute

"Justice Stories/Our Stories"

“Justice Stories/Our Stories” is a collaborative research, documentation, and archiving project that will look at three movements for justice in Bangladesh: the Rana Plaza disaster (workers’ justice and accountability), the Kansat Movement (rural electricity access) and the Road Safety Movement (road safety, justice, and accountability for road crash survivors). Partnering with Bangladeshi legal aid organization BLAST, I will work with a team of young research assistants to conduct oral histories and collect and catalog archival assets relating to the three main focal points of the project. These materials will form the basis of an online archive that will include a searchable database with short biographies of key actors in various justice movements, contemporaneous articles, legal records of cases, copies of relevant laws and policies or their extracts, video testimonies and photographs of key actors, an infographic setting out a chronology of the milestones, and a summary of key events and developments for each of these movements. We hope this archive will be a resource for students, teachers, researchers, legal professionals, and visual storytellers, and will serve as a model for similar projects in future.