Dr. Hailey Otis and Ph.D. Student Morgan Thoem Win FSRA Award!

A great recognition and opportunity for graduate mentorship

COMM Assistant Professor Hailey Otis and Ph.D. Student Morgan Thoem have won a 2026-2027 Faculty-Student Research Award (FSRA)! They won for their project, "Memory Justice for Body Positivity through Digital Community Archiving."

UMD's Graduate School supports faculty projects through the FSRA Program. It's a unique opportunity for faculty to mentor graduate students and collaborate on creative scholarship and research projects. 

Dr. Otis and Thoem are collaborating on a public-facing, critical archival project that draws from rhetorical history/field methods and digital humanities to combat the cultural amnesia that is already beginning to emerge around the body positivity movement against the backdrop of what fat studies scholars and fat activists are calling "the Ozempic era." They will ultimately produce an interactive community timeline of the body positivity movement—a living and constantly evolving digital archive committed to deepening collective memory of the movement by locating diverse starting points of body-positive activism and tracing its evolution over time. This project responds to the "symbolic annihilation," or the systemic misrepresentation, trivialization, and/or erasure of fat activism in the official archive and will serve as a form of “memory justice” that platforms the voices of those most impacted by fatphobia and affords them control and agency over their stories, pasts, and collective memory. Dr. Otis and Morgan will embark on the first stage of this envisioned community timeline over the summer: a digital exhibit of interviews that Dr. Otis has conducted for her ongoing oral history project, Body Positivity’s Beginnings: Commemorating the Voices of Early Movement Builders.