Congratulations to these DS community members! Dennis Lang Award: Lee Steadman, Disability Studies. Harlan Hahn Student Awards: Anjali Truitt, Public Health Genetics; and Heather Evans, Sociology. Harland Hahn Research Awards: ET Russian, UW Medicine; Jose Alaniz, Slavic Languages & Literatures; Joanne Woiak, Disability Studies.

Lee Steadman received the Dennis Lang Student Award in honor of their work developing the new D Center this year.

Anjali Truitt will be using the award for dissertation-related expenses. This qualitative research project explores how public conversations in policy, media and health communication frame the clinical utility of prenatal genetic testing for Down syndrome. This project will help to illuminate the complexity of how the public likely understands the risks and benefits of such testing and to offer suggestions about how and what information about Down syndrome prospective parents may want to know.

This award will allow Heather D. Evans to attend the 2014 Society for Disability Studies (SDS) conference and present preliminary data from her dissertation examining everyday understandings of the law, the construction of disability, and stigma management among individuals who experience intermittent, non-evident impairments, sometimes referred to as 'invisible disabilities.'

ET Russian's award will be used to complete and tour a book about disability culture and politics, to be published by Left Bank Books Publishing in Winter 2014.  THE RING OF FIRE ANTHOLOGY is a collection of the zine from the late 1990s by ET RUSSIAN (aka Hellery Homosex), and features new material never before published. Through black and white ink drawings, comics and linoleum block print portraits, essays, interviews and erotica Russian explores the intersections of disability, gender, sexuality, race, art, history, class, the politics of work, healthcare, ableism, trauma and healing.
Alternately emotional and erotic, funny and political, RING OF FIRE tells Russian's own personal story and also captures the work and words of various artists and leaders from disability culture and history. A young feminist raised on riot grrl, Russian became disabled at age 18 in a traumatic accident, lost both legs and learned how to walk again. Steeped in the cultures of queer and punk Russian began exploring a cultural identity of disability and wrote RING OF FIRE. Years later, after becoming a disability justice activist Russian has continued to explore what it means to create disability culture. As a health care provider at a rehab hospital, art and writing have been an outlet for Russian to explore the gifts and frustrations of being on the giving and receiving end of healthcare in the USA.

Jose Alaniz intends to research Russia's disability community and its (self-) representation in cinema. He plans to track down and copy films from the last two iterations of the CWB festival at the Moscow NGO which organizes it, Perspektiva. He will also interview several prominent figures in the disability community (such as activist Yurii Kuznetsov and writer Alexander Melikhov, both of St. Petersburg), as well as disabled filmmakers (e.g., Vladimir Rudak, in Petrozavodsk). His plan is to turn these investigations into an eventual book-length study of disability in Russian cinema, especially of the early Soviet, post-war and post-Soviet eras.

Joanne Woiak will present a paper at the 2013 Society for Disability Studies conference on "Public History, Privacy, and the Archives," about challenges and strategies in researching the history of eugenics. This work is part of a panel discussion about recovering and narrating disabled people's histories in and out of institutions.

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