PhD Students’ Paper Wins National Award

PhD students Shahrzad Sajadi, Katherine A. Aronson-Ensign, and Matthew L. McClellan have won the N. Joseph Cayer Public Administration Best Student Paper Award for 2020 from the Western Social Science Association (WSSA). The co-authors will present their paper, titled “Voices of Syrian Refugee Child Brides: A Photovoice and Herstory Project in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon,” at the WSSA 2020 Virtual Conference.

​The co-authors have been working with their classmates and with Assistant Professor Valerie L. Karr on this project for more than two years. Their work focuses on the use of PhotoVoice technology to document the stories of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. The students highlighted these stories in a photo exhibit in New York City in 2019, and have won multiple awards to keep their work on this topic going.

“This award really does highlight what SGISD and our student’s hearts are all about,” said Dr. Karr, who has visited the Bekaa Valley three times, once with Aronson-Ensign.

Learn more about the Bekaa Valley project and other international work done here at UMass Boston.