Gillian Joseph was one of two winners for the 2018-2019 Knapp Fellowship Award. Her research project, Find Our Women, began with Gillian talking to women who were survivors, and family members of Indigenous women that are missing, murdered or victims of violence. She did this work within her honors thesis research and wanted to find protective factors for these Indigenous women. She began looking at the Dakota Access Pipeline camp, and concluded that decolonizing a space/society is a protective factor for violence against Indigenous women.
To learn more about Gillian’s early phases of the research project, and her inspirations for the project read this article!
After one year of Gillian’s groundbreaking community-based research, she was published in the APA journal through an internship at the American Psychological Association. She focused on Native American issues and met a Native American psychologist, who helped her publish a paper about the intersection of psychology and violence against women. She also has another article under review in the Journal of Indigenous Research .
To read Gillian’s journals click these links:
APA Journal: https://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/communique/2018/11/standing-sisters Journal of Indigenous Research: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/kicjir/
Gillian is creating a non-profit organization, Project Find Our Women, which gives money to Indigenous women to tell stories from their communities that aren’t being seen or heard so that other women can relate, and reach out if they are feeling the same violence or treatment. Learn more about Project Find Our Women here.
Gillian is graduating from GW and will get her master degree through a program called Erasmus Mundus, which is a program through the EU and fully funded. She will focus on cross-cultural psychology. She wants to continue her work and extend it to other Indigenous populations. She also wants to expand her non-profit and tell different stories. Gillian has done excellent work, her progress in a year is just amazing. Nashman is so proud of Gillian, and we're excited to see what her future holds!
