It’s been an exciting few months!

Not only does mid-May find me wrapping up my year of fieldwork in Petrozavodsk (bye for now, everyone – I’ll miss you!), my email inbox has been full of good news and encouragement.

In April, it was announced that my paper was selected for the 2013 Irving K. Zola Award for emerging scholars in disability studies! The paper argues that considering the Soviet case complicates how we understand the role of capitalism in pathologizing disability. I’ll accepting the award at the Society for Disability Studies conference in June in Orlando.

I was also recently awarded the 2013 Summer Graduate Research Fellowship by the Program in Sexuality Studies at UNC-CH, to help support my work in Petrozavodsk. Read more about how my work fits into the Sexuality Studies framework here.

I was thrilled and honored to learn that the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at UNC-CH selected me for this year’s Honigmann Graduate Award in Sociocultural Anthropology, a yearly honor to a graduate student in the department. This honor was particularly sweet, in that my dissertation adviser, Michele Rivkin-Fish, took the time to nominate me and highlight my work to the rest of the faculty.

Finally, returning to North Carolina, I picked up my mail to find two copies of “Learning to See Invisible Children,” a book of case studies on inclusive education efforts in Central Asia. Chapter Five in this volume is one that I coauthored with Galina Ailchieva, and presented at CIES in 2012. I am so excited to read this volume in full – each of these case studies proposes important lessons for best practices in implementing inclusive education. Major thanks to editors Kate Lapham and Martyn Rouse who put this incredible book together. Also, this is the first time that I get to see my name as an author on a book chapter – wheee!

Summer 2013 is shaping up to be a whole new ballgame, as I move on from fieldwork to transcription and analysis. I’m looking forward to digging in to all the interview data collected over the past year. So – friends in Petrozavodsk – I may not be with you physically, but I am very much with you in spirit!