Amy Sojot, a PhD candidate in the COE Department of Educational Foundations (EDEF), received a 2020–2021 RCUH Graduate Fellowship Award. The fund was created to assist graduate students enrolled full-time in a doctoral program at UH Mānoa.

“I am very thankful for this award because it will allow me to comprehensively interrogate all of the philosophical nooks and crannies to develop an innovative contribution to contemporary educational studies,” Sojot said. “I plan to use the graduate fellowship and $4,000 to focus on writing my dissertation.”

Sojot, who also earned her master’s in EDEF, serves on the Tinalak Filipino Education Advisory Council and is a councilmember of the College of Education Doctoral Student Association (COEDSA) where she served as chair from 2017–2019.

Her dissertation work, “Pedagogical Sensations: Feelings, Things, and Bodies in Education,” examines the relationality between humans and educational things, such as policy, data, SEL curriculum, and artificial intelligence in adaptive learning devices. Using philosophical inquiry informed by feminist new materialisms, she investigates contemporary assumptions about sense, experience, and pedagogy.

“This award would not have been possible without the support of my department, Tinalak, COEDSA, COE colleagues, and especially my wonderful advisor, Hannah Tavares,” Sojot concluded. “Through their guidance, I have grown as a scholar and educator.”