YCAR offers or adjudicates nine awards to graduate students at York University on an annual basis. In 2020, 21 students received over $40,000 in support of their research, fieldwork and language studies. In each Update over the summer, we will introduce the 2020 winners.

In this issue, we congratulate Heather Evans (Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies), this year’s recipient of the Dr. Sangdeok Woo and Mrs. Kwisoon Lim Woo Memorial Graduate Award. Their dissertation research draws on transnational feminist theory and memory studies to critically examine how militarized sexual harm and racialized, gendered resistance are constructed through the memorialization practices of the transnational “comfort women” movement. This project is informed by Heather’s 13 years of experience as an activist, researcher and educator with the “comfort women” movement in the South Korean and Canadian contexts as well as nearly a decade of academic and organizational research on post-conflict memorialization landscapes, “sexual slavery” discourses, and human trafficking discourses and policies.

The Dr. Sangdeok Woo and Mrs. Kwisoon Lim Woo Graduate Award was created by the Woo family to support graduate students undertaking research on the topics of Korean history, culture or society.

More about YCAR’s awards can be found here.

The next deadline for YCAR-administered award applications is 9 February 2021.