University Times

Four members of the University community will be honored with the Iris Marion Young Award for Political Engagement today, Oct. 24. The awards ceremony will begin with a keynote address at 3:30 p.m. in the Pittsburgh Athletic Association’s Pennsylvania Room.

This year’s winners are:

• Jessie B. Ramey, an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow in women’s studies and history, a founding member of the Pittsburgh Great Schools Coalition and founder of Yinzercation, a grassroots movement to save regional public schools. Ramey twice has been invited to the White House to meet with President Obama’s senior policy advisers on education issues.

• Sherdina Harper, coordinator of cross-cultural programming at Pitt and adviser to the Rainbow Alliance, Black Action Society and Campus Women’s Organization. She provides diversity training for staff and faculty on how best to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning students at Pitt.

• Alicia D. Williamson, who earned her PhD at Pitt this year and is a visiting postdoctoral lecturer in English. She is being honored for helping to found Pittsburghers for Public Transit while she was a graduate student. She has been a member of the Thomas Merton Center’s economic justice committee and helped found the Pittsburgh Collaborative for Working Class Studies.

• Junior Audrey-Marie H. Winn, who has been active in AmeriCorps VISTA in the Pittsburgh area. This summer she documented the plight of migrant workers in China and presented her findings, in Mandarin Chinese, at Sichuan University.

The award is given to Pitt community members who are working to promote social justice and democracy, as did the late Iris Marion Young, a former faculty member in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

Giving the keynote address will be Nancy Scheper-Hughes, activist and professor of medical anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, who will speak on “The Revolution in Maternal Thinking and Child Survival in Northeast Brazil: The Political and Moral Economies of Mother Love.”

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