The following message is from the University Staff Council and Office of Human Resources:
Dear UMW Colleagues,
We are excited to announce this year’s recipients of our annual employee awards, presented Tuesday, Oct. 17, during the Employee Appreciation Luncheon. If you missed the event, you can read more in the UMW News story and share in our congratulations to this year’s honorees.
Assistant Director of Residence Life and Housing John Hughey, Academic Services Program Support Technician Anna Hollrah, and Academic Services Administrative and Office Specialist Allison Smith won the University Staff Council’s Larry Atkins Award, recognizing UMW’s “unsung heroes.”
Senior Student Success Coordinator Brian Strecker was announced as the recipient The Coleman Award, recognizing a classified or hourly employee’s dedication and exemplary service.
The Hurley Award for exceptionally meritorious service and character went to Simpson Library’s Head of Special Collections and Digital Scholarship Angie Kemp.
During the luncheon, we also shared with employees that UMW will be retiring the dress code policy. The University trusts that employees will present themselves in a professional manner and use good judgement to “dress for their day,” depending on their meeting schedule, standards of their professions, and level of interaction with the public. Employees should work with their supervisors if they have questions. We ask that employees wear their nametag when working with our many audiences so it’s clear you are someone who can answer questions and help navigate campus services and resources. Name badges can be requested online, and you’ll need your department FOAP to place the order.
We also celebrated the news from the recent state budget, which includes a 2% raise for UMW employees effective in December, in addition to the 5% raise already allocated this year. We look forward to gathering again in December for the annual holiday party. Save the date for Friday, Dec. 15.
Please contact Human Resources if you have any questions, and for more information about the annual employee awards, which result from nominations by the University community members. Please contact Terri Arthur (tlockhar@umw.edu) regarding the Coleman and Hurley awards or Sarah Appleby (sappleby@umw.edu) about the Atkins award.
Dr. David T. Mitchell is a founder of Disability Studies in the Humanities. His work along with his partner, Sharon Snyder, serves as a cornerstone of what has come to be known as cripqueer studies. Cripqueer studies foregrounds not only disability as an identity seeking inclusion and rights, but as an active verb exposing the necessity of structural critiques of normativity. Without disability we cannot fully know how marginalized bodyminds understand it, navigate it, critique it, and expose the cracks that define normativity as forms of docility instrumental to belonging. His academic and creative filmwork pursues alternative pathways on which the designation of incapacity often turns into an unexpected capacity. Thus, the marginalization, exclusion, erasure, and destruction of cripqueer lives results in fissures of our cultural knowledge base that must be crossed by intimacies that only disability experience, theory, and the arts can provide. In their first film, “Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back” (1995), Mitchell and Snyder unveiled the alternative interdependencies that inform what they call, crip culture, and deployed those non-normative practices as a critique of the Western myth of independence that is central to liberal humanist formulations of the Human. The film also demonstrated how disability queers all forms of being. Join Dr. David T. Mitchell on October 12th at 6:30 in the Digital Auditorium for a chance to hear him elaborate on these topics and be a part of the conversation.