The Women & Gender Studies Institute would like to congratulate PhD Student Valley Weadick on being selected as a recipient of the School of Graduate Studies’ 2025-2026 Burstow Scholarship for Studies in Activism from the Margins.
The scholarship was established with the support of Professor Bonnie Burstow and other donors and is awarded based on academic merit to registered graduate students working on a thesis focused on activism by populations traditionally thought of as mad, or which would once have been so conceptualized.
In Valley’s own words: “Most of the time it feels fraught to work on transness and madness, given the current shape of anti-trans rhetoric and longer histories of transness as pathological. The award feels like an affirmation of the importance of bringing together mad and trans perspectives to reckon with those histories, as well as our current moment when trans and neurodiverse and so many other people are under attack.”