2023-24 Graduate Student Fellows Announced

Keymeulen’s project focuses on perinatal bereavement and its association with family violence, aiming to improve training and support for nurses and residents caring for patients undergoing intrauterine fetal demise or induction termination of pregnancy, with a focus on women experiencing family violence. In collaboration with the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at UC Irvine, she will help create focus groups to better understand the needs of providers for perinatal bereavement training, as well as online modules to supplement the required training at UCI. The research has positive implications for public health, as studies have indicated a strong link between pregnancy loss and intimate partner violence (IPV). The project aims to address the gap in training and support for providers, ultimately improving the quality of bereavement care and reducing the negative impact of family violence on perinatal loss. Progress to date includes a study involving 14 perinatal nurses in a series of workshops, which revealed changes in nurses' perspectives regarding ethical boundaries and the importance of compassionate care. The research will continue to assess patient, physician, medical student, and nurse needs and advocate for improved perinatal bereavement care with IPV training, with the potential for widespread adoption of effective interventions. 

In the next year, from April 2023 to April 2024, Keymeulen plans to use the funds to build on this research by continuing to understand patient, resident, and nurse needs in terms of perinatal bereavement care in the context of patients experiencing family violence. Specifically, she will purchase access to the Articulate 360 software to help create the modules, as well as provide financial incentives to hold focus groups to better understand the needs of nurses and residents in their perinatal bereavement training. Keymeulen also plans to use the funds to attend and present the research at conferences to disseminate the findings and help raise awareness of the importance and efficacy of perinatal bereavement care and ending family violence.  

Malae's dissertation examines how dating apps shape processes of sexual consent and unwanted sexual contact among 130 heterosexual and LGTBQ+ young adults. Recent studies suggest that dating apps allow sexual partners to “cyber date” before meeting in person, creating the opportunity for individuals to communicate their sexual interests and boundaries online before initial meet-ups. This research implies that dating apps improve patterns of sexual communication, leading to more affirmative practices of consent (Lundquist and Curington 2019). However, research on gendered sexual violence and unwanted sex indicate that young adults continue to experience gendered interactional pressures towards sexual activity (such as saving face), which contribute to experiences of unwanted sex (Ford 2018). Moreover, meeting on “hook-up apps,” such as Tinder and Grindr, signals a willingness or interest in sexual activity (Thompson 2018). Therefore, it is likely that for dating app users, gendered interactional pressure for sexual activity is (re)negotiated as people move from digital spaces to in-person meetups. To fully understand how dating apps shape processes of sexual communication, Malae asks: How does the intersection of gender, sexuality, and college experience shape how young adults communicate, understand, and express sexual interest and consent in the digital context and in-person?

This funding from the Initiative to End Family Violence Fellowship will allow Malae to present her research at the Society for the Study of Social Problems in August of 2023. Disseminating her findings on how dating apps facilitate instances of gendered interactional pressure, leading to violations of consent, is a crucial step for raising awareness of technology-facilitated violence. This funding will also allow her to continue using my research to combat gender and sexuality-based violence by creating protocols for preventing miscommunications/violations of consent.

Scholars have increasingly highlighted how intimate partner violence (IPV) has evolved over time, particularly as technology has advanced. The existing body of literature pertaining to technology-facilitated intimate partner violence (TFIPV) has primarily concentrated on the impact of technology within an abusive relationship. However, there is a dearth of research that adopts a more comprehensive approach to examining the role of technology within the larger ecosystem of IPV stakeholders. This IPV ecosystem consists of the various stakeholders who provide assistance to victims and survivors and strive to reduce and eventually eradicate such violence. These stakeholders may include law enforcement personnel, legal professionals, case managers or caseworkers, and victim advocates. This research study revolves around the broad research question: What role does technology play in the various interactions within an IPV ecosystem? To answer this research question, Punla will conduct interviews with stakeholders affiliated with Family Justice Centers in Orange County, CA. Conducting interviews with this population will provide a stakeholder’s perspective on how technology plays a role in facilitating violence within abusive relationships, the extent of knowledge stakeholder’s have regarding TFIPV, and, alternatively, how technology is being used as a tool to help victims and survivors seek help and services.

The UCI Initiative to End Family Violence Fellowship will primarily be utilized to facilitate Punla's attendance at conferences, where she intends to solicit feedback from experts in the field. In addition, she will use the fund to pay for local travel expenses for communicating to and from interview locations, as well as qualitative data analysis software and transcription services.

Roskin-Frazee's research explores the questions: Why do women and genderqueer people of color make up a disproportionate number of women and genderqueer people convicted of sex crimes in California? How are sexuality and gender performed differently for women and genderqueer people of color accused of causing sexual harm in California, relative to white women? To explore this issue, Roskin-Frazee will examine data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, interview currently and formerly incarcerated women and genderqueer people accused of causing sexual harm, and analyze parole hearing transcripts. She argues that race can cause women and genderqueer people of color to come across as masculine and queer, and therefore more capable of sexual aggression. Accordingly, she hypothesizes women and genderqueer people of color accused of causing sexual harm will get more negative messaging about intimacy, be more conscious of policing their gender performance, and have gendered and racialized language foregrounded in their parole hearings.

Funding from UCI’s Initiative to End Family Violence will allow Roskin-Frazee to obtain data from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and attend conferences on intimate partner violence.

Tricic's dissertation’s main research question broadly inquires: how do activists and policymakers use narrative and embodied performance to construct and submerge public memories of sexual violence? This dissertation focuses on the following three key themes that emerge from the process of constructing and challenging public memories surrounding sexual violence. 

• Narratives and narrative framing in peacebuilding activism
• Embodied narratives
• Spatial mobilization

First, she begins by examining the role of narratives and narrative framing in peacebuilding activism. She examines the ways that narrative framing is used to mobilize groups about traumatic wartime memories and to encourage other civilians to participate by establishing diverse activist frames that they can  relate to. Second, she examines the role of embodied narratives, or the ways in which individuals make sense of their everyday lives through felt experiences and emotions that are situated from moment-to-moment within and across time and space (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2012). She investigates the embodied nature of narrative to understand the role of narrative in healing and in the experience of policy conflict. Third, she examines the theme of narratives in relation to mobilization over space and the complex collective identity interest formation between invented and invited spaces created by survivor activists. She focuses on performed narratives and examines how they relate to the empowering (or disempowering) nature of spaces.

First, this dissertation will explore the complexities in choosing when to tell stories, why to tell certain stories and details to various audiences, and when not to tell stories. Tricic proposes to shift away from binary narratives of ‘survivorship’ and ‘victimhood’ and explore the spectrum of narratives that are shifting and updating to build upon existing ideas and better understand how organizations help a diverse group of peacebuilding activists to use stories to engage in complex and nuanced policy debates. Over the course of 2.5 years, she collected stories from organizations dealing with gendered violence during the Bosnian war. She refers to this data collection as her “pilot study” and she provides more detail in the methods section. Second, this research will explore the ways in which a variety of survivor activists use narratives to shape policy frames, given that one key related discussion in the public policy literature surrounds the way in which policy issues are framed in messages to be absorbed by citizens (Schneider and Ingram, 1993).

Third, further research is needed in exploring this notion with regards to narrative framing surrounding who is deserving of benefits and in exploring the relationship of social construction of target populations in activists who use narrative as a way to frame policy debates about war reparations (Schneider and Ingram, 1993). The dissertation poses questions about the complexity in survivorship where organizations determine who a “real” survivor is and who is entitled and deserving of benefits while others may not be considered deserving.

Fourth, this dissertation will examine the gaps regarding static frames and the presence of multivocality, or the presence of multiple and complex voices that often challenge the binary of stories that present survivors as either victims or survivors (Wylie, 2008). More specifically, one key gap in the literature includes understanding how collective activist frames change and complicate over time with the appearance of new stories and conflicts that arise as activists face challenges with political institutions, with their and other competing organizations, and within themselves. 

Currently, Tricic has worked with 12 organizations since her entry to the doctoral program in 2019. She has completed 2 internships and volunteered for 1 organization, which has resulted in fieldnotes, recordings, and around 30 hours of interviews that need to be translated and transcribed in Bosnian. Given that it is a total of 1,800 minutes and the average cost of transcription is around 3 dollars, a part of the grant will be utilized for transcription/translation. She will continue her work in the summer of 2023 by interning for the Srebrenica Memorial to collect the final parts of her data.