UIC graduate students receive Spencer fellowships

Two University of Illinois Chicago graduate students, Jasmine Jones and Elizabeth Maher, have earned National Academy of Education Spencer Dissertation Fellowships. The highly competitive fellowship supports 35 exceptional dissertation projects on the history, theory, analysis or application of formal and informal education.

As a Spencer fellow, Jones, who is pursuing an interdisciplinary math and science education concentration in the curriculum and instruction program, will complete her dissertation exploring the relationship between science education and justice-centered community-based projects.

Jones is also a Chicago Public Schools science teacher. “My dissertation centers both my science classroom and summer technology program as the contexts through which I explore how physics and technology education can be repurposed as community-responsive, liberatory praxis,” she said. “I analyze how teachers and students engage the structure-agency dialectic present within a participatory STEM project to address community issues at the intersections of canonical STEM knowledge, environmental justice and digital technologies.”

The award will help Jones fulfill her career goals of bridging community development and education research by centering the voices and expertise of community members in the design, analysis and implications of community-based projects.

For Maher, a doctoral candidate in history, the fellowship will allow her to finish her dissertation on the history of autism in the United States and the roles race and gender have played in that history.

“I examine how assumptions about race and gender were built into autism from when it was first introduced as a discrete diagnosis in the early 1940s,” Maher said. “I am particularly interested in exploring how, in the post-World War II era, ‘psy-professionals’ — psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers — and educators, writers, parents and autistic people have used autism as a venue to discuss anxieties about social changes. These include how white supremacist systems have been challenged by members of the Black Freedom movement and how the increased role of middle-class women in the workforce has reshaped conceptions of white masculinity and hegemonic views of white male superiority.

“I hope that by exploring how notions of race and gender have been baked into autism since its first introduction as a discrete diagnosis, I can get a better understanding of the role of ‘psy-disciplines’ in shaping dangerous myths of cultural superiority,” Maher said.

Maher’s achievement is the culmination of a long engagement with history. She credits her success to participating in Disability Cultural Center events at UIC and interning and volunteering with Access Living, a Chicago-based disability service and advocacy center run by people with disabilities.

Jones and Maher are the third and fourth UIC doctoral recipients of the fellowship in four years.

Written by Aldo Foe, UIC Graduate College