Students for Choice Receives the 2014 Feminist Practice Award
This annual award recognizes Women’s and Gender Studies majors or minors whose work in community service or activism best exemplifies application of feminist thought to practice.
Students for Choice
This was a banner year for Students for Choice at the University of Michigan, a long-standing student organization that uses feminist frameworks to advocate for reproductive rights. Among its many activities in 2013–14, Students for Choice members wrote magazine articles and op-ed pieces for student publications, distributed flyers amid the Midwest polar vortex, produced the Vagina Monologues, and collaborated with U-M Students for Life to offer services for pregnant people on campus. Throughout the year, Students for Choice kept reproductive rights issues in the public eye, especially when a new abortion insurance law was passed in the Michigan State Legislature.
Zeinab Khalil, Honorable Mention
Zeinab Khalil is a scholar, student leader, and campus activist whose feminist practice draws on the passion, experience, and authority of feminist scholarship. Zeinab’s activist work at the University of Michigan is extensive and wide ranging. She was co-founder of the Michigan Women of Color Collective, where she brought theories of intersecting, multiple oppressions into active practice in the creation of a space for love and healing. She was a member of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality’s Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions Committee; and of the steering committee for the conference Beyond the Quota. She sat on the President’s Advisory Commission on Women’s Issues, served as President of the Muslim Students’ Association, worked as the first bilingual tutor for U-M’s Sweetland Center for Writing, and wrote about social justice issues as a columnist for the Michigan Daily.