02/07/2021

Congratulations to the 2021 ORWAC Feminist Scholar of the Year

Alyson Farzad-Phillips

Congratulations to Alyson Farzad-Phillips, the 2021 ORWAC Feminist Scholar of the Year!

Farzad-Phillips' article, "Huddles or Hurdles? Spatial Barriers to Collective Gathering in the Aftermath of the Women's March," published in Women's Studies in Communication vol. 43, issue 3, was judged the best article of the year from an excellent pool of scholarship.

The abstract states: "This analysis attends to the Women’s March Huddles initiative, an aggregate of 5,400 events in February 2017 that aimed to harness the power of the march to build political momentum in local communities. Using digital mapping tools, this article illuminates the logics of space and place embedded in these events. Specifically, I (re)created the digital maps and map layering to illustrate how the locally based Huddles initiative perpetuated race- and class-based exclusion through spatial arguments. This case study shows that scholars not only can analyze the rhetorical messages of maps as they find them but also can create maps and engage in mapping to render previously abstract phenomena visible and analyzable. Attending to both the affordances and critiques of digital mapping as a feminist method, I ultimately argue that digital mapping offers opportunities for rhetorical inquiry."

One reviewer wrote: "Farzad-Phillips, with her innovative rhetorical map-making, sheds light on the issues of racial equity in Women's March in Washington DC in 2017. The article provides unique and hard-not-to-cite observations on how the huddles project erected invisible barriers for black women through its material and spatial organization. The author advances understandings of feminist mass protest at the intersections of gender, race, and class through the study of spatial agency and decolonial awareness."

 

Please join us in congratulating Alyson Farzad-Phillips for her amazing work!