by Michelle McKinley, Director, CSWS, and Dena Zaldúa Frazier, Operations Manager, CSWS

What a year…in many ways for CSWS and for the UO campus community as a whole, this past year was the best of times and the worst of times. 

Both CSWS Director Michelle McKinley and Operations Manager Dena (Zaldúa) Frazier began our tenures here in July 2016. A few days after we began, on July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was murdered—yet another shooting of a black man at the hands of police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Protests followed across the country and in Baton Rouge. At the same time, students and others on the UO campus marched to say Black Lives Matter. 

In response, CSWS posted a powerful photo (pictured above) to our website in solidarity with the UO protestors and the protestors in Louisiana. In many ways, the photo and the CSWS post in solidarity set the tone and tenor for the year to come—CSWS is here for justice for everyone, and we are intentional about our commitment to dismantling institutional systems of oppression based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, and more. The photo is powerful but also beautiful in its framing and imagery: we see a graceful image of a black woman in a flowing dress standing her ground in power, impervious to intimidation, as police officers in riot gear approach her. 

And as the year progressed, CSWS did our best to channel that calm, quiet strength that the woman in the photo projects. Yes, two powerful women in their own right, both UO professors, who were beloved to the CSWS family passed away. Yes, a law professor dressed in blackface for the Halloween party she threw, to which she had invited her students. Yes, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. 

And through all of it, CSWS decided to focus on creating community and creating support for our community here on campus, as well as on bringing voices to campus who are mostly underrepresented.

To that end, we decided to focus our work for the year on a theme of “Women & Work,” honoring the legacies of two legends, taken from us all too soon: Joan Acker and Sandi Morgen. Deciding on and carrying out that theme for the year felt a bit like a circling back to our roots, at the same time as we looked through a new lens of intersectionality at the ways in which Women & Work is still a necessary theme for a research center focused on gender in 2017. (Side note: check out our new wordmark on page 2!)

We kicked off the academic year with the Lorwin Lectureship on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Our first speaker was the truly legendary Cherríe Moraga, renowned Chicana lesbian feminist author, poet, and playwright. One of the grandmothers of the intersectional feminist movement in the 1980s, Moraga has always asked us to look at our struggle for equality through her eyes as a brown, queer, working class woman. She came to campus, now an esteemed professor at Stanford but no less still a voice for those of us on the margins and in the shadows, and blew everyone away. She gave a keynote lecture and conducted a workshop using drama and theatre for a small grtoup of students, faculty, and staff—no one left that room in the Many Nations Longhouse unaffected. 

After the election in November, CSWS knew we needed to convene a space for community to just gather and take solace and recharge our political commitments to our community and our planet. Faculty had come to us with concerns for some of their students’ welfare as the unofficial reports of troubling harassment—directed at those with brown skin, head scarves, Spanish speakers and other differences—rose. So we hosted an Open House in the CSWS office in December, to offer a space and time to connect outside of the rigors of daily work life, and to create new connections amongst the family of CSWS folk. The positive reaction from attendees and those who missed it but wished they had been there made us take a second look at the idea of an Open House, and made it clear that we were offering an answer to a need for community building in a safe space. So we launched our monthly Open Houses, co-hosted at times with other departments and units on campus, and have greatly enjoyed seeing friends, both new and longstanding, each month of the academic year. 

The day after the election, when many of us were walking around in a stupor caused by varying degrees of the full gamut of human emotions, CSWS hosted a day-long forum on social justice philanthropy. We had feared the terrible timing of the event might cause attendance at our event to be close to zero, but as it turned out, the opposite occurred—the Browsing Room in the Knight Library was full, and attendees told us how grateful they were for the chance to just be with a community of people on campus that they knew were safe and with whom they could commiserate and offer a shoulder of support. While we never could have predicted the strange twist of events that would cause us to hold a forum on that particular day on purpose, it was serendipitously a small moment of grace and blessing that was very much needed. And all of us at CSWS will always be grateful that we were able to offer the attendees support that day. 

Continuing in the spirit of speaking truth to power and bringing issues otherwise seen as outside the realm of social, racial, and gender justice, Saru Jayaraman visited and inspired everyone who was in her presence. The founder of a union for those in the food industry, ROC United (Restaurant Opportunities Centers United), Jayaraman brought an unflinching and rarely-seen view of how food justice must extend past the fields and farms where our food is grown and reach all the way into the back of every restaurant kitchen as well. 

As part of our celebration of Black History Month, CSWS held three Allyship Trainings for faculty, staff, and students with facilitator Janeé Woods, whose expertise, nuanced skill, and experience made it the single event for which we have received the most positive feedback. Her trainings have helped the UO community to be a safer, more welcoming place for everyone who is a part of it, and we plan to bring her back for more in-depth trainings this year.

We were thrilled to welcome Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, as our speaker for our 2017 Northwest Women Writers Symposium. Eloquent, funny, down-to-earth, brilliant, and a true artist, Mathis spoke with warmth and collegiality to our audiences from campus and the Eugene/Springfield community who gathered in the JSMA and the Eugene Public Library’s downtown branch. 

Rinku Sen, president and executive director of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation and the publisher of the award-winning news site Colorlines, spoke about “The Big Picture: Structural Racism, Equity & Intersectionality,” and the Browsing Room of the Knight Library was full of students, faculty, and staff alike who eagerly listened to her breakdown of how structural systems of oppression must be undone to achieve lasting change. 

And to cap off an incredible year, we ended it with our final big event, which was a day-long symposium on slavery, intimacy, domestic care work, legal advocacy, and colonial Latin America in celebration of CSWS Director Michelle McKinley’s release of her book, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700. Scholars in the field from across the country attended to join in the panel discussions, a keynote, and a festive reception. 

And then, as we sat down to take a look at the year that was, we learned that the gorgeous photo of resistance and solidarity we had featured at the beginning of last academic year, taken by Jonathan Bachman, had been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the 2017 World Press Photo Contest. We were thrilled to learn this, and while we can take no credit for the photo or the very worthy awards and praise it has won, it does feel like a bit of validation for our choice to feature that photograph and channel its subject’s strength, and further blesses the auspicious beginnings of CSWS’s year.

What will this academic year bring? We cannot say for certain, but we know this: we will continue to fund feminist research; we will continue to convene a space for community and create support for those on the margins; we will continue to ensure feminist, anti-racist, LGBTQ-positive, anti-classist, anti-ableist discourse, debate, and conversation happens on the University of Oregon campus. We are here for the long haul, and we are here for you. We hope to see you at one of our events, or simply while grabbing coffee at the EMU. Join us. 

—In peace, justice, and solidarity,

Michelle McKinley, Director

Dena Zaldúa Frazier, Operations Manager