Previous Feminist Scholar Award Recipients

The CSWE Council on the Role and Status of Women in Social Work Education annually names feminist scholar and manuscript awardees (formerly feminist scholarship honoree and awardee) who have advanced feminist knowledge as it pertains to social work theory, research, practice, policy, and education.

2024 Feminist Scholar Award Recipient

Courtney Cronley, MSSW, PhD
Dr. Cronley is Professor in the University of Tennessee (UT) College of Social Work. She investigates how the built environment contributes to social injustices and health disparities and how investments in housing and transportation infrastructure can increase access to opportunities and promote well-being, with a focus on women and children. She utilizes critical feminist and community-engaged pedagogies, as well as theories of critical race, intersectionality, social exclusion, and social justice. Dr. Cronley actively collaborates with civil engineers, computer science engineers, geographers and urban planners and has been funded by HUD, DOE, DOT, and NSF. She brings a feminist perspective to the convergent team science and promotes gender equity in land use and infrastructure. She is former Co-Chair of UT’s Commission for Women, faculty liaison for the National Center for Excellence in Homeless Services, Faculty Fellow in the UT Center for Transportation Research, and Faculty Fellow with the UT Howard H. Baker Jr. School’s Center for Energy, Transportation, and Environment Policy. She is an active faculty mentor to graduate students and colleagues across the UT community. Dr. Cronley brings a women-centered focus to all aspects of her work from scholarship to teaching to service.

2023 Feminist Scholar Award Recipient

The 2023 Feminist Scholar Award Winner is Dr. Leslie E. Tower. Dr. Tower is Director of the WVU Women’s Resource Center and Professor and Assessment Coordinator in the WVU School of Social Work. Her recent scholarship focuses on gender equity in institutions of higher education. Her research has been funded by NSF, FDA, and USDA as well as private foundations. She currently is the external evaluator for a US DHHS-NIH-National Institute on Aging grant. 

Dr. Tower was co-principal investigator on the original WVU NSF ADVANCE grant. She led the policy development component of it, resulting in numerous work/life integration policies. One of her publications from the project, was highlighted in Science (hyperlink: Diversity through ADVANCEment). She is a former Chair/Co-Chair of the CSWE Council on the Role and Status of Women in Social Work Education, Track Chair of the CSWE APM Feminist Scholarship Track, and Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Women & Social Work (AFFILIA).

 

2022 Feminist Scholar Award Recipient

The 2022 Feminist Scholar Award Winner is Saundra Starks, PhD. Dr. Starks is a Professor Emeritus of Social Work and the former MSW Program Director at Western Kentucky University. She has over 45 years of professional social work experience which includes teaching, research, consultation, training, supervision, and clinical practice. She has numerous presentations and publications in the areas of diversity, women, spirituality, mental health, supervision, cultural competency, and leadership training. Dr. Starks also maintains a part-time psychotherapy practice in Bowling Green, Kentucky (Bower, Starks, Reeves & Hayes). In addition, she serves on several local, national, and international community service committees and boards. As a few indications of her extensive commitment to the global community, Dr. Starks was the most recent past president of the Bowling Green International Center Board for refugee resettlement. Likewise, she has extensive experiences in teaching study abroad courses in Taiwan, Tanzania, Ghana, and Belize. A current scholarship passion for Dr. Starks is a research project called Project Rafiki in Tanzania that is an interdisciplinary food assistance program for a center that provides services to people living with HIV/AIDS. Among her many years of extraordinary contributions to the profession was her post as CSWE's Chair of the Board of Directors (July 2019–June 2022).

 

2021 Feminist Scholar Award Recipient

The 2021 Feminist Scholar Award winner is Dr. Colita Nichols Fairfax. Dr. Fairfax is a professor in the Ethelyn R. Strong School of Social Work, Robert C. Nusbaum Honors College Senior Faculty Fellow, and inaugural faculty scholar in the Center for African American Public Policy at Norfolk State University. She has written articles, reviews, chapters, and two books: Hampton, Virginia (2005) and Timeless History and Service: The Iota Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., 1922 to Our Time (2017). She has edited two books, Social Work, Marriage and Ethnicity: Policy and Practice (2016) and The African Experience in Colonial Virginia: Essays on the 1619 Arrival and Legacy of Slavery (2021), and she wrote the foreword for A Guidebook to Virginia’s African American Historical Markers (2019). Dr. Fairfax earned the PhD and the MA in African American Studies from Temple University, the MSW from Rutgers University, and the BA in social work from Howard University.

As a professor, Fairfax forcefully challenges students to think critically about historical and social conditions, best cultural community practices, and the impact of social policy on the African American community in the historically Black college and university spirit of excellence and virtuosity. A specialty of her scholarship involves developing womanist historiographies about African American social reformers in the state of Virginia. Her knowledge production has unearthed data about Maggie Lena Walker, Ida Barbour, Virginia Randolph, Vivian Carter Mason, Willie Jones Dell, Janie Porter Barrett, and Mary Peake.
 
Dr. Fairfax was appointed to the city of Hampton’s 400th Commemorative Commission in 2010, where she contributed to documenting African American contributions on several historic markers and articulated how the African figure of the tricultural anniversary statute on Settlers Landing Road in Hampton should be depicted. She served as co-chairman of the city of Hampton’s 2019 Commemorative Commission, tasked with planning activities commemorating the arrival of African people in English North America, Point Comfort (present-day Hampton) in 1619. In 2013, with the late Dr.  (Delegate) Mary Christian, she co-founded the Barrett-Peake Heritage Foundation, Inc., tasked with restoring the state headquarters of the Virginia Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs founded in 1908. Dr. Fairfax is currently the foundation president.
 
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe appointed Dr. Fairfax to the State Board of Historic Resources in 2016. She is in her second 4-year term, having served as vice-chair (2018–2019) and chair (2020–2021). Governor Ralph Northam reappointed her to that board and to the Commission for Historic Statues in the United States Capitol, tasked with removing and replacing the Robert E. Lee statue in the U.S. Capitol in 2020. She is a charter member of the Hampton Roads chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and Culture and a founding member of the Hampton Roads chapter of the National Association of Black Social Workers. Since 2014 she has served as national chair and paramount instructor of the African-centered Certification Academy. Dr. Fairfax is also a member of the National Association of Social Workers, Council on Social Work Education, CSWE Taskforce to Advance Anti-Racism, Social Work Journal Editorial Board, National Council of Negro Women–Hampton/Newport News Section. She is a life member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., initiated at Howard University in 1987.
 

2018 Feminist Scholar Award Recipient

The 2018 Feminist Scholar Award Winner is Dr. Judy L. Postmus. Dr. Postmus is a professor and associate dean for Faculty Development and Strategic Initiatives at Rutgers University's School of Social Work. She is also the founder and former director of the Center on Violence Against Women & Children. Her research is on physical, sexual, and economic victimization experiences of women with her most recent attention given to developing a Violence Against Women Research Consortium, funded by the National Institute of Justice (2016-MU-CX-K011). She has given many local, national, and international presentations on the impact of policies and interventions for survivors of violence. Her work is strongly influenced from her 20 years as a practitioner and administrator.
 

2016 Feminist Scholar Award Recipient

The 2016 Feminist Scholar Award Winner is Halaevalu F. Ofahengaue Vakalahi. Dr. Vakalahi is a Pacific Islander immigrant woman of Tongan heritage, born in Tonga and raised on the Northshore of ‘Oahu, Hawai’i. She earned her Ph.D. in Social Work and a Master’s in Educational Administration from the University of Utah, an M.S.W. from the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, and a B.S. in Business Management from BYU-Hawai’i. She is a Professor and currently the Associate Dean in the School of Social Work at Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD. She has served in faculty and administrative positions in several universities as well as in various capacities in professional organizations including the Council on Social Work Education and National Association of Social Workers and in her Pacific Islander and Baltimore communities. Her areas of teaching include social policy, human behavior and the social work environment, organizational leadership, and cultural diversity. Her two areas of scholarship are: Pacific Islander culture and community, and Women of Color in academia. Her publications in these areas of scholarship include a number of peer-reviewed articles, chapters/references, co-edited/co-authored books including her most recent work titled, Social Work Practice with African Americans in Urban Environments (Wells-Wilbon, McPhatter & Vakalahi, 2015), Transnational Pacific Islanders and Social Work (Vakalahi & Godinet, 2014) and The Collective Spirit of Aging across Cultures (Vakalahi, Simpson, Giunta, 2014); and a number of competitive presentations.

 

2016 Feminist Manuscript Award Recipients

The 2016 Feminist Manuscript Award is given to Rebecca A. Matthew and Vanessa Bransburg for their paper "Democratizing caring labor: The promise of community-based, worker-owned childcare cooperatives."

Rebecca A. Matthew is an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia’s School of Social Work and holds graduate degrees in Public Health and Social Welfare. She is deeply committed to community-based research, teaching, and service that support endogenous community development, cooperatives and labor justice, and the solidarity economy. By calling upon her experiences ranging from organizing county-and university-wide living wage campaigns to evaluating mindfulness-based programming for incarcerated youth to conducting research on worker-owned cooperatives and labor justice, she attempts to enliven conversations and reimagine possibilities for greater community and economic justice. She has co-authored book chapters published by Cambridge University Press and Sage Publications, as well as several individual and collaborative articles published with the Journal of Community Psychology, International Journal of Social Welfare, Health Psychology, and the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

Vanessa Bransburg was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and emigrated with her family to San Diego, CA in 1988. She studied Sociology and Spanish literature for her Bachelors at UCLA and later received her Masters in Social Work at Columbia University in NYC. She was the Director of Cooperative Development at the Center for Family Life (CFL) in Brooklyn, NY from February 2008 to August 2015. While at CFL she helped develop and grow the program to have 10 staff members, support an ever-growing worker cooperative incubator program for immigrant and low-income residents, establish the NYC Cooperative Development Initiative to support NGOs in becoming cooperative incubators, and was one of the founders of the NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives. She is currently living in San Diego, CA with her husband and son and working as a Cooperative Development Specialist at Democracy at Work Institute.
 

2015 Feminist Scholar Award Recipient

The 2015 Feminist Scholar Award Winner is Edith M. Freeman, professor emerita at the University of Kansas. She has taught graduate-level courses that focus on clinical practice, practice and program evaluation, school mental health, cultural competence, narrative practice, the African American family, and best practices in work with children and families.The author of 16 books, Freeman has received several honors for her teaching and research. Her numerous articles have appeared in professional journals on mental health treatment; substance abuse treatment and prevention; community development; organizational change; cultural competence, including practice with Black families; and qualitative research and evaluation. The award will be presented at the Women’s Council Networking Breakfast.