Fall 2021 Award
The Women’s Well-Being Initiative (WWBI) focuses on creating change through research, teaching, and activism projects that address critical concerns of women and girls, local communities, and the mission of the USC Women’s and Gender Studies program. Through this initiative, Dr. Olga Ivashkevish facilitates arts-based workshops for young women, promoting engagement with and discussion of everyday issues faced by young people. 

Olga Ivashkevish
Women’s and Gender Studies

Fall 2021 Award
A charrette is an intense period of design or creative activity with a focus on process, iteration, community, and expression. Through this initiative, the School of Visual Art and Design’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee is committing resources in support of a digital design charette focused on pressing DEI issues. All students involved in SVAD courses are invited to form groups and develop an artwork, presentation, exhibition, and/or other work which pertains to a local DEI issue. 

Evan Meaney
School of Visual Art and Design

Spring 2022 Award
In terms of possible areas of research and appropriate methodologies, prospects for the study of race and religion remain significantly underdetermined, making it difficult to design and carry out research projects. This issue is especially fraught for persons of color, and most especially for undergraduate students. The Department of Religious Studies will hold a student-focused conference on race, religion, and social justice with both short- and long-range objectives. 

Stephanie Mitchem
Department of Religious Studies

Spring 2022 Award
Signed languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), are valid, systematic, and rule-governed languages. However, many people, even in academic settings, do not appreciate the equality of signed languages with spoken (or oral-aural) languages. The Department of Linguistics has established a lecture series of Deaf linguists and activists in order to facilitate greater awareness, understanding, sensitivity, and inclusion of the Deaf community and its language practices, particularly the use of ASL.

John McCullough
Department of Linguistics

Spring 2022 Award
Women and under-represented minorities (URMs) are severely missing in Physics and Astronomy. To better reflect the society we live in and seek to serve, it is absolutely essential to increase the representation of women and URMs in our department. One of the primary difficulties in increasing the representation of women and URMs in Physics is one of recruitment; as such, the Department of Physics and Astronomy will host a Graduate Recruitment Event, an Undergraduate Recruitment Event, a Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, and create Graduate Student DEI Ambassadors. The overall goal is to increase recruitment, improve retention, and improve DEI awareness in a sustainable fashion. 

Varsha Kulkarni
Department of Physics

Spring 2022 Award
In conjunction with the Diversifying Archaeology Collaborative Humanities Group and other department initiatives to increase outreach and incorporate greater diversity of student backgrounds, this project seeks to increase outreach and recruitment efforts, and provide a more equitable exposure to an archaeology career path, hopefully resulting in a more diverse enrollment of Anthropology and Archaeology students. Since underrepresentation of diverse backgrounds occurs at both the undergraduate and graduate level, the Department of Anthropology seeks to invite both graduate and undergraduate students to shadow Anthropology students. This project—an outgrowth of prior public presentations—will provide students with short experiential learning forays into the profession and assist in fostering a diverse and inclusive environment on campus for under-represented minority students in undergraduate and graduate programs at the University of South Carolina.

Kelly Goldberg
Department of Anthropology