Each year, the Women & Gender Studies and the African & African American Studies programs confer special honor with the Sojourner Truth award. The recipients are George Mason University instructional faculty members nominated and selected for their scholarship, teaching, and activism at the intersections of race and gender.
We are excited to announce that Dr. Carol Cleaveland, Dr. Deborah Kwak, and Dr. Stefan Wheelock are the 2025 Sojourner Truth Faculty Award recipients! We appreciate their remarkable work and have included their interviews below.
Dr. Carol Cleaveland
Department of Social Work, Associate Professor
Dr. Carol Cleaveland is an Associate Professor of Social Work at George Mason University. She has been researching Latino immigration since 2004, when she began working with Mexican day laborers in Freehold, N.J., to understand how they negotiated police harassment and anti-immigrant ordinances. Since 2013, her work has focused on Latinas from Central America and immigration-related trauma, including experiences in human smuggling and efforts to receive asylum. Her book, "Private Violence: Latin American Women And The Struggle For Asylum" with Dr. Michele Waslin (NYU Press, 2024) won the 2025 Association of American Publishers' Prose Award for social work/applied psychology.
What does it mean to you to receive this award and recognition?
I'm grateful for the award because it shows an increasing awareness of the human rights violations suffered by women from Latin America who need asylum because of gender based violence. An understanding of the scope of such violence and the battles waged by these survivors to win asylum is critical — especially now that Trump has suspended asylum claims at the southern border.
Can you talk about the ways that your work considers the intersections of gender and race?
The women who are the focus of our book suffered gender-based violence by either domestic partners or gang members in their home countries, before coming here to seek safety through the asylum process. Their countries of origin have laws on the books making this violence illegal, but prosecution is rare, and women found no help from law enforcement. Once they came to the United States, they endured racialized narratives that impugn migrants who cross the border as 'illegal immigrants.' These narratives fail to account for the severe gender-based violence that principates asylum claims.
Dr. Deborah Kwak
Mason Korea, Sociology, Assistant Professor
Dr. Deborah Kwak joined Mason's Korea campus in Spring 2021 from a position as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal and Restorative Justice at Malone University in Canton, Ohio. Dr. Kwak examines student experiences in U.S.-based international branch campuses (IBCs) and how DEI values and strategies can be operationalized in the IBC higher education context.
What does it mean to you to receive this award and recognition?
I am honored to be recognized for my work and teaching at Mason Korea. It’s also uplifting to reflect on how my calling and academic journey as a teacher-scholar has contributed to my students’ understanding of race and gender.
Can you talk about the ways that you encourage your classes to consider the intersections of gender and race?
In the sociology and criminal justice courses that I teach at Mason Korea, my students and I examine how race and gender shape and structure people’s experiences and opportunities as well as produce and reproduce serious social inequalities in society. I challenge my students to also reflect on their own social positions in their branch campus and Korean contexts: by examining the additional complex layers of social identity such as social class, nationality, exposure to cultures, English language proficiency, educational background, and immigration status that may shape student experiences in the classroom.
To achieve these goals, I often try to bring lived experiences into my classroom because I believe that students become more curious and more motivated to learn when they are able to connect the abstract concepts to people and their experiences. For example, in my Contemporary Gender Relations course, I organize a panel where I invite faculty colleagues to share with my students issues of gender, intersectionality, and their personal challenges related to gender within their family and the workplace. Also, in my Race and Ethnicity course, every student conducts an interview of an individual who is from a different racial, ethnic and/or cultural background and then uses the interview data to write a human interest story about the individual. By exposing students to as many diverse voices as possible, they are able to think differently and critically about the social problems they examine in my courses.
How does your research connect with these approaches to teaching?
In my ongoing scholarship as a teacher-scholar, I focus on understanding student experiences in the classroom and on campus. In a study that I’m collaborating with two other faculty at Mason Korea (Dr. Shannon Davis and Dr. Lynnette Leonard), we seek to understand how students’ gendered beliefs, experiences and gender dynamics in the classroom affect student learning and success. In another study (with Dr. Shannon Davis), we interrogate the meaning of diversity in the Korean context and examine how branch campus faculty and administrators can operationalize DEI values in the specific context of the branch campus and its surrounding host community.
Dr. Stefan Wheelock
Department of English, Associate Professor
Dr. Stefan Wheelock specializes in the study of Atlantic history and culture with a specific focus on early African-British and African-American literatures. His teaching and research interests are late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century black antislavery writing with a particular emphasis on slave narrative autobiography, early black polemic, and their contributions to Atlantic political and intellectual currencies.
What does it mean to you to receive this award and recognition?
Receiving the Sojourner Truth Faculty Award feels like not only an honor but a reminder of the mission I share with other scholars and students of African and African American studies: that as a discipline, AAAS not only critically highlights and celebrates the expressive cultures of the African diaspora, but also stands as a redoubt for the advancement of knowledge, truth, and justice in a global culture of antiblack racism.
Can you talk about the ways that your work considers the intersections of gender and race?
At the historical and ideological foundations of Africana studies is an intersectionalist approach to Black intellectual and political resistance. I am a student of late nineteenth-century Black women’s resistance; and I am reminded of the ways that Black women’s leadership was pivotal in the antilynching campaigns, as well as in the nationalized attempts, after the Civil War, to reinforce Black peoples’ rights and freedoms. Black women (along with their White compeers) realized that the Women’s Movement was, by necessity, critical to any advancing project of equity and radical democracy in the United States. As the political historian Martha Jones notes, Black women assumed the lead in key areas of racial uplift while helping to center marginalized voices in the rise of a “public” intellectual culture at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Whose historical wisdom shapes your social justice framing today?
Anna Julia Cooper, the late nineteenth century Black feminist political philosopher, stated that “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class,--it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity. Now unless we are greatly mistaken the Reform of our day, known as the Woman’s Movement, is essentially such an embodiment, if its pioneers could only realize it, of the universal good.” I view these words as both a crisp articulation of a necessary change in nineteenth-century politics and as a charge for those of us who are contending for equity and justice in the midst of political uncertainty and upheaval in the twenty-first century. For me, her words continue to resonate as they provide a mandate for how AAAS and Women’s and Gender Studies reimagines a robust critical framework for the politics of progressive left action.
March 26, 2025