GSS Year-End Celebratories (2021)
July 9, 2021
To the 2021 GSS Majors and Minors:
On behalf of everyone associated with the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, we want to extend warm congratulations to each of you on your graduation from Northwestern University. We have been grateful for your presence in our classrooms and want you to know how much we have been inspired by our conversations with you as well as by your many insightful contributions to the GSS project. With the small gifts included here, we aim to honor your achievements and celebrate this significant moment in your lives. Congratulations!
We also want you to know that we have been impressed again and again by your resilience, creativity, and dedication during this very difficult year and a half. We well know that the effects of the pandemic have not been borne equally, either locally or globally. We hope that all we have discussed together in Gender & Sexuality Studies classes has enabled you to better understand how specific economic, political, social, and cultural conditions have contributed to the uneven effects of the pandemic. We feel certain that, given the way the pandemic upended many of your dearest hopes and plans for this last year and yet produced imaginative responses and great creativity among you, that it will be you and your generation who will lead the way in thinking about how our societies must change in order to become both more equitable and more just in order to avoid what we have seen this year. We encourage you to continue to speak up as you have for all that you believe in and to work actively with others as they seek to change the conditions of their own lives.
We wish you the very best in your future endeavors and hope that you will continue to remain in touch with Gender & Sexuality Studies. We are proud of your achievements and always heartened to learn of the imaginative ways our GSS Majors and Minors put their degrees to “good trouble,” in the words of John Lewis, as well as to useful, responsible work.
With all best wishes and warm congratulations again,
Awards
RAE ARLENE MOSES LEADERSHIP AWARD
This award is presented each spring to a graduating senior who has fostered initiatives and demonstrated leadership, both within the classroom and in co-curricular activities sponsored by the Gender & Sexuality Studies program.
- Kenny Allen
Kenny’s intellectual commitments to a stronger anti-racist, feminist classroom are inseparable from his activism. His advocacy for police abolition on campus powerfully enact black feminist politics and ethics. From writing on the racialization of space on campus and the gender, racial, and class dynamics of Greek life, to his appearance in a forum confronting the university administration about their shameful response to student protests, Kenny puts the politics at the heart of Gender and Sexuality studies into powerful action.
- Amy Prochaska
Amy is a leader in the values and politics of Gender and Sexuality Studies in and beyond the classroom. She demonstrates her commitment to activism and social change as Executive Director of Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators on campus, and through her work on intimacy coordination in the arts. She translates concepts of gender equity and sexual violence to offer concrete, accessible steps for people, including educators and artists, to show empathy and build inclusive community more effectively.
GEORGE C. CASEY PRIZE
This award goes to the best undergraduate essay on any topic relating to gender & sexuality written in a GSS course this last year.
- Lydia Weir
“Reasonable Accommodations: Biopolitics and Disclosure of AccessibleNU at Northwestern University” – Ashley Ferrell's "Feminist Theory, Biopolitics, and the University" course
Brilliantly bringing Foucault’s notion of biopower to analyze university student services, Lydia documents with great insight how the disclosures required by AccessibleNU create normative understandings of disability that frequently retraumatize students who exercise their right to accommodation. The prize committee praised this incisive and critical account of the micropolitics of university life.
PHI BETA KAPPA INDUCTEES
Each spring, the Northwestern chapter of Phi Beta Kappa elects juniors and seniors in Weinberg College to that society. Students do not apply to Phi Beta Kappa, but are elected on the basis of numerous criteria, including GPA, the selection of courses, and instructors' recommendations. No more than 10 percent of any graduating class may be elected.
- Sarah Eisenman (Junior)
- Chase Stokes (Senior)
SENIOR MARSHAL
Senior marshals are graduating students whose home school is Weinberg College and are selected by their department or program to carry the banner for their major at the College’s convocation ceremony, when it is held in-person. Although this year’s celebration is virtual, the departments and programs of the College wish to recognize the students listed below as their senior marshals.
- Chase Stokes
Click here to view the full booklet of congratulatories from GSS faculty