PhD student becomes first-ever nurse selected for Humanities Without Walls fellowship

Sabrina Jamal-Eddine

UIC College of Nursing PhD student Sabrina Jamal-Eddine, RN, was selected for the 2022 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop .

Humanities Without Walls (HWW), based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Humanities Research Institute, is a consortium of humanities centers and institutes at 16 major research universities, including UIC. It is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In summer 2022, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Humanities will host the annual HWW summer workshop “for doctoral students interested in learning about diverse careers as humanists,” explains the HWW website.

Jamal-Eddine will be the first participant to represent the field of nursing since the fellowship program was launched in 2015 and the first applicant accepted from UIC since 2019.

Jamal-Eddine is studying the use of spoken word poetry as critical narrative pedagogy to educate nursing students about ableism and disability justice in healthcare. (Read a profile of Jamal-Eddine to learn how her own experiences as a disabled student informed her research.)

She serves as a graduate student representative for the UIC Chancellor’s Committee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities. She is also creative director for the Middle Eastern North African (MENA) Student Association, which focuses on healthcare equity for MENA populations, and the nursing graduate student senate representative. In 2019, she performed a TEDx spoken word at The University of Ohio on her experience with Islamophobia and xenophobia.