The Student Veterans of America (SVA) chapter at the University of Illinois (Illini Veterans) at Urbana-Champaign collaborates with the Military Service Knowledge Collaborate (MSKC) at the Chez Veterans Center (CVC) to award the efforts of undergraduate and graduate students at UIUC who are either 1) student-veterans conducting any type of research or 2) non-veteran students conducting research with military/veteran (M/V) populations. The purposes of this award are to both encourage student-veterans to participate in research and to highlight research activities centered on veterans and military-affiliated communities being conducted by UIUC students and through the CVC’s MSKC.
We are so proud to announce the winners of our inaugural Chez Veterans Center Student Research Award and are grateful to the UIUC Illini Veterans for sponsoring this award!
Sarah Ann Clark is a United States Air Force Veteran, current PhD student in Linguistics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a military sociolinguist and research assistant at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) Construction and Engineer Research Laboratory. Sarah’s research focuses on several avenues of sociolinguistic analysis of military and veteran discourse. About her work, Sarah told us, “As an Air Force veteran, my military and veteran experiences are critical to understanding military social norms and veteran identity processes as I engage with critical discourse analysis and critical narrative analysis to examine themes of power, ideology and discursive influences on military and veteran identity.”
Paul Saban is a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran and a senior in the School of Social Work. Paul draws on his personal experiences as a Marine to shine light into the masculine nature of the military institution and Veteran identity. Paul shared, “it is my intention that my research can perhaps elucidate some of the underpinnings of masculinity’s more confounding behaviors and unconscionable acts such as aversion to treatment and help seeking, high-risk behaviors, domestic violence, and sexual assault and harassment.”
