Lynn Fujiwara

CSWS was awarded a Ford Foundation grant in March 2008 from the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW). “Diversifying the Leadership of Women’s Research Centers,” was meant to promote the leadership of women of color from historically underrepresented groups in the United States within NCRW and within its women’s research, policy, and advocacy member centers. CSWS and the UO Office of the Vice President for Research provided matching funds.

Lamia Karim

Originally formed as a CSWS Research Interest Group, Women of Color has now emerged as a CSWS project under the leadership of Lynn Fujiwara and Lamia Karim. Fujiwara is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. Karim, recently tenured associate professor of anthropology, received CSWS support for her work on feminist legal reform in Bangladesh.

“The project specifically designed for CSWS was to address the current and historical absence of women of color in leadership positions at the center,” said Professor Fujiwara.

“Institutional Ethnography” — A Talk by Dorothy Smith

Friday, November 13   Lillis Business Complex, room 285

Dorothy Smith

Dorothy Smith is a major feminist sociologist, theorist, and methodologist. Among her many books are: The Everyday World as Problematic; Conceptual Practices of Power; and Institutional Ethnography: A sociology for people.

Dorothy Smith received the American Sociological Association’s Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (1999) and its Jessie Bernard Award for contributions to feminist sociology (1993). She earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, taught at the University of British Columbia and was a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto) for 25 years. At present she teaches at the University of Victoria.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society, the Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group at CSWS.

Cosponsored by the UO Department of Sociology and the UO Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.

UO law professor Michelle McKinley

University of Oregon law professor Michelle McKinley has been awarded a Newberry Library Short-Term Resident Fellowship for Individual Research for her work-in-progress titled “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1700.”

A member of the CSWS Women of Color Junior Faculty Project, McKinley began teaching at the UO in 2007. She is researching legal actions taken by  female slaves to achieve formal emancipation in 17th-century Peru. The fellowship supports her scholarship at the Newberry Library collection in Chicago. Speaking to the Oregon Daily Emerald student newspaper, McKinley commented: “I want people to look at the experience of slavery in a more nuanced and historically accurate way. I want to look at the ways that law can be used for social justice and as a means of repression, all during which I would like to make a contribution to Afro-Peruvian history.“

A documentary by Gabriela Martínez (RT 37 minutes)

Illuminating Important Questions in 21st-Century Mexico

Silent March

This documentary by Gabriela Martínez, University of Oregon assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, tells the story of a media takeover that changed the nature of politics, and how we understand media, social movements, and in particular the role of women in both media and social movements.

Following a teacher’s strike in Oaxaca, Mexico, in August 2006, about a thousand women marched to the installations of COR-TV, taking over the stations to voice their political, social, economic, and cultural concerns while also calling for the resignation of the State’s governor, Ulises Ruíz Ortíz. The film opens with the 2007 celebration of the first anniversary of the takeover, and quickly moves to narrate how and why women got to this point.

Martínez lets the women and all other actors involved in the events speak for themselves. Issues of justice, globalization, women’s rights, and human rights violations converge at the core of a social uprising, in which media becomes an important site for the struggle.

Women, Media, and Rebellion in Oaxaca is excellent for scholars, students, and general audiences interested in women studies, social movements, media in developing countries, empowerment, indigenous peoples, and international communications.

See more about CSWS-related research in Oaxaca

See the related website: “Making Rights a Reality”

A new online resource lists social service providers who have the capacity to communicate with Spanish-speaking clients with limited command of English. The “Directory of Bilingual Social Services” for the Eugene-Springfield community is located here on the website of the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS).

The directory is primarily intended for providers—although sections of the directory have been translated to Spanish, the listings themselves have not. By phoning local providers, members of the CSWS Research Interest Group “Becoming Bicultural: Latino Immigrant Mothers Raising American Children” found that currently 123 agencies and organizations have bilingual capacity to communicate with Spanish-speaking clients with social service needs.

“This shows a substantive improvement during the decade,” co-coordinator Marcela Mendoza said. “However, Centro Latino Americano in Eugene is still the only organization with culturally competent, fully bilingual staff. On a different note, all the social service agencies that we called in Springfield are bilingual, but not all the agencies that we called in Eugene have the same capacity.”

This directory is an outcome of a series of three workshops for Latino parents that the research group organized and presented at Springfield High School in February 2009.  At the end of the third workshop, they distributed a list of bilingual social services in our community. The parents in attendance expressed the need to (a) get a more comprehensive listing, and (b) make local service providers aware of the bilingual services that are “out there” to help Spanish-speaking clients with limited command of English.

June 25, 2009—Anthropologist and CSWS researcher Marcela Mendoza has been picked as interim, half-time executive director at the nonprofit agency Centro Latino Americano in Eugene, Oregon.

Marcela Mendoza

Services at Centro Latino Americano include children’s programs, multicultural parenting classes, crisis and referrals, transitional housing, counseling, English as a Second Language classes and a jobs program.

Mendoza recently co-edited the “Directory of Bilingual Social Services” with funding through a mini-grant from SELCO Community Credit Union and CSWS sponsorship. Mendoza is the co-coordinator of the CSWS Research Interest Group “Becoming Bicultural: Latino Immigrant Mothers Raising American Children.”