Professor and Dean Emerita Mary Ann Danowitz Will Use Fulbright Specialist Award to Explore Gender Equality for European Union INSPIRE Project

NC State College of Education Professor and Dean Emerita Mary Ann Danowitz will spend six weeks at the Open University of Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, this fall as the recipient of a Fulbright Specialist Award.

Run by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright Specialist Program is an opportunity for scholars to engage in a project-based exchange at host institutions around the world. Danowitz’s Fulbright project is entitled “Organizational Transformation for Inclusive Gender Equality” and will be embedded in the European Union’s INSPIRE project, a 12- country initiative housed in Barcelona. 

“This Fulbright Specialist Award is the culminating experience of my career, as it will address a critical issue for universities globally: how to increase inclusivity,” Danowitz said. “It will enable me to draw on my two decades of comparative research on equity, diversity and gender in the European Union in the United States, along with my efforts to bring about organizational change as a former dean and department head in the College of Education at NC State.”

Danowitz’s project will focus on intersectionality and ways to understand and address manifestations of equality and inequality in their full complexity as part of the Open University of Catalunya’s Gender and ICT research group. The work will contribute to their development of insights and understanding about the ways in which theoretical perspectives on intersectionality and inclusive work environments apply to policy as well as organizational change processes. 

Her work will specifically examine how to design inclusive gender equality plans that simultaneously address multiple dimensions of discrimination, how complex interventions produce multiple intended outcomes and unintended consequences, and how to develop and implement effective data monitoring strategies and analytical approaches for intersectional analysis. 

The project builds on her previous work with INSPIRE, where she has served on the Expert International Advisory Board for the past two years, engaging with researchers and practitioners across 95 institutions in Europe. 

“I hope that my work alongside my European colleagues will contribute to developing innovative policy approaches, tools and knowledge to address intersecting inequalities in various sectors and geographic regions in Europe that will be used by senior managers, scholars, equality experts, practitioners and trainers to improve equity in research and innovation,” Danowitz said. 

When she returns to the U.S. in January,, Danowitz plans to work closely with the NC State Office of Faculty Excellence to promote the Fulbright program and assist faculty members who are interested in participating. 

As the recipient of a Fulbright Specialist Award, as well as being a two-time Fulbright Scholar who engaged in work in Indonesia and Austria, she hopes to draw on her own experiences to assist faculty members at various stages of their academic careers.

“Some of my other engagement with Fulbright has included…evaluating and recommending candidates for awards to the Fulbright commissions throughout the world, so I have insights into criteria and decision making processes at our national level,” she said. “ I look forward to being able to continue to give back to NC State by working with faculty across the university.”