“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 scholar and CSWS Executive Committee member Louise Bishop explores the healing power of words in her recent book, Words, Stones & Herbs (Syracuse University Press).  In a presentation sponsored by the CSWS Healing Arts Research Interest Group, Bishop will talk about her book, which looks at the role of word and gender in healing, healing and the vernacular, and other aspects of poetry, language and metaphor in the healing arts of medieval and early modern England.

Louise Bishop is associate professor of literature and associate dean, Clark Honors College.

Place: Center for the Study of Women in Society

330 Hendricks Hall

Jane Grant Conference Room

Professor Bishop will trace the medical, theological, and popular uses of noli me tangere, “touch me not,” to situate and unmoor the phrase from its place on a remedybook’s page.  She  argues for a discursive relationship—highly material, eminently bodied, fully social, narratively pious, complexly gendered—between the disease name as it appears in a remedybook and the cultural resonances afforded by the phrase’s Biblical echo.  A Latin phrase can take on a range of meanings in vernacular contexts. Catching the shadow of Mary Magdalene, patron saint of apothecaries, in Bodley 591’s recipe opens a space for other ways to read and contextualize Middle English remedybooks.  Read in this fashion, the phrase noli me tangere enacts one of Rubin’s “creative moments” that “allows us to touch medieval bodies” (Miri Rubin) that were themselves touched by reading that heals.

Read the story about Professor Bishop in the Daily Emerald.

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood (Seal Press, October 2009)

Campus Duck Store, 895 E. 13th Ave., Eugene

Melissa Hart

5 p.m.–5:45 p.m.   Reception

5:45 p.m.   Reading

6:30 p.m.   Signing & Reception

Gringa bookcover

“In the 1970s and early 1980s, mothers who came out as lesbians routinely lost custody of their children to homophobic court systems and outraged fathers,” says author Melissa Hart.  When she was 9 years old, this happened to her mother in Southern California, and Hart and her younger siblings weren’t allowed to live with her again until they turned 18.

Hart documented this era in her new memoir Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood. CSWS awarded Melissa Hart a grant to work on this book in 2007. Hart teaches journalism at the University of Oregon and memoir writing for U.C. Berkeley’s online extension program. For more information about Hart’s work, visit her website at www.melissahart.com.

Fir Room, Erb Memorial Union.

“Salvation in his Arms?: Racial Reconciliation in a ‘Post’-Racial Era”

a lecture by Rebecca Wanzo, associate professor of Women’s Studies and English at Ohio State University.

Paper summary: Are we in a “post”-race era? How do Hollywood narratives contribute to discourse about a post-racial U.S.? In a discussion of recent Hollywood melodramas that depict white men saving black women, Wanzo explores how racial reconciliation narratives in the 21st century treat therapy as the answer to structural and institutional ills.

Sponsored by  the Department of Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Center for the Study of Women in Society.

CSWS Director Carol A. Stabile has this to say about Rebecca Wanzo’s new book:

“Tracing the invisibility of the suffering of African American women across media, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised offers an important analysis of the many ways in which African American women’s experiences have been excluded from narratives about social violence and victimization. Wanzo’s book serves as a reminder about the necessity of considering gender and race relationally for women’s studies, cultural studies, and studies of crime, media, and culture.” — Carol A. Stabile, author of White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in U.S. Culture

Browsing Room, Knight Library

Sponsored by CSWS, the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and the ASUO Women’s Center)

Panel members include:

Rebecca Wanzo, associate professor of Women’s Studies and English, Ohio State University; Jocelyn Hollander, associate professor, UO Department of Sociology; and Mara Williams, graduate student, UO School of Journalism and Communication.

Place: 330 Hendricks Hall,  Jane Grant Conference Room

Get a head start on your CSWS Research grant applications.

Jennifer Erickson, 2009 Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship Winner

Carol Stabile, director, Center for the Study of Women in Society, will facilitate a CSWS Grants Question and Answer Session related to the upcoming January 15, 2010 application deadline for CSWS research-related grants for UO faculty and graduate students. Click here to access CSWS grant guidelines and applications.  Please note that all application proposals must have a women and gender related component.

Click here to read about the proposals of past grant awardees.