“Men and Family Work: What’s Changing, What’s Not”

Place: Gumwood Room, Erb Memorial Union

Scott Coltrane is dean of the UO College of Arts and Sciences. He has a new article coming out in the journal Sex Roles (Mexican American men and housework/childcare), an article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences on social policy and men’s family work, and a chapter in a book in the Real Utopias series at University of Wisconsin that asks how gender equality could be promoted via leave and childcare programs. Read an interview with Coltrane in the 2009 CSWS Annual Review.

Place: 330 Hendricks Hall, the Jane Grant Conference Room.

Alisa Freedman, assistant professor, East Asian Languages and Literatures, with a specialty in Japanese literature and film, will talk  about her trip to Tokyo to research a new book on Changing Images of Workingwomen on Japanese Television Dramas.  Japanese primetime serials have depicted workingwomen since the early 1990s. More than being mere entertainment, these fictional narratives educate viewers about real social issues and dramatize media discourses. Because of the characters and the ways their stories are told, dramas have an impact on the lives of female viewers. Television attracts a large and diverse audience at home and abroad, and therefore it is a good way to view social values, assess Japan’s global image, and see how popular culture shapes gender norms.

Alisa received a CSWS Faculty Research Grant in the amount of $3910 to support this work. Read about Alisa’s 2009 summer travels in Japan in her blog entry.

Ingrid Nelson, at the Centro de Formação Jurídica e Judiciária in Matola, Mozambique.

Graduate student Ingrid Nelson is one of eight UO students to receive a U.S. Student Program Fulbright award this year. The grant will support her doctoral dissertation research, “Gender Equity and Rural Sustainable Development in Zambézia, Mozambique.”

A Ph.D. candidate in geography, Nelson delivered a CSWS “Noon Talk” last May. Nelson spoke about a groundbreaking new family law passed in Mozambique in 2004, which is meant to extend ecosystem access to the poor. She shared preliminary observations from her internship with a grassroots environmental organization in Mozambique in 2007. She also outlined her upcoming research concerning the implications and outcomes of this new law.

The Fulbright will support Nelson’s 10-month stay in Maputo and Quelimane, where she will compete the majority of her research in rural communities.

Nelson was the recipient of a CSWS and Center on Diversity and Community
(CoDaC) Award in 2007/2008 for “Forests and Women’s Lives: Locating Rural Women’s Power in the Context of Natural Resource Access in Mozambique.” Her advisor is Lise Nelson, a UO assistant professor of geography.

Place: 330 Hendricks Hall, the Jane Grant Conference Room.

Bryna Tuft, East Asian Languages and Literatures (graduate student and GTF), “A Fine and Private Place: Literary Privacy and Feminist Politics of the Self in the Works of the Advant-Garde Women Writers.”

In the period of economic expansion and increasing openness to personal expression and individuality following Deng Xiaoping’s “Open Door” reforms, the avant-garde women writers engaged in a project of resistance to the traditionally appropriated use of the female body, image, and voice.  This resistance can be seen in the ways they consciously construct a private space in their fiction, by presenting alternate forms of female sexuality (in contrast to the heterosexual wife and mother) and by adding details of their own personal histories in their writing.  Critics of this literature often oversimpify it, attacking it as being self-exploitative and trivial, while feminist supporters often take an over-naturalized view of the descriptions of female sexuality.  While I am certainly motivated by the feminist project of the relocation and revitalization of women’s writing, in this study I will focus on the somewhat more complex issues of privacy in these women’s works, and in this way respond to both critics and advocates of these women’s writing.

Place: 330 Hendricks Hall, the Jane Grant Conference Room.

Deborah Olson, assistant professor, Special Education, “Understanding Disabled Women’s Experience with Abuse.”

Place: 330 Hendricks Hall, the Jane Grant Conference Room.

Jennifer Erickson, doctoral student, Anthropology, “Gendered Citizenship and the State in a Neoliberal Era: Refugees and Social Service Organizations in Fargo, North Dakota.”

This talk is based on her dissertation which uses social service organizations as a lens for examining broader ideas about social citizenship in a neoliberal era in the United States. By comparing Bosnian and Southern Sudanese refugees and their experiences with public and private social service organizations in Fargo, North Dakota, her research aims to better understand the quotidian ways in which gender, race, class, and culture shape ideas about citizenship and the state.