by Jenée Wilde, Senior Instructor, Department of English, CSWS Dissemination Specialist
Anthropology professor Gyoung-Ah Lee has stepped up to lead the Women of Color (WOC) Project at CSWS—a role formerly held by Interim Director Sangita Gopal, associate professor of cinema studies.
Lee has been a faculty member at University of Oregon since 2007. According to her bio, as an archaeologist Lee examines “human-environmental interactions in terms of cultural resilience and social complexity in East Asia, a core area where several economically important plants were first domesticated, influencing social and economic relations to this day.”
“The goal of my work is to document and understand the transition from hunting-gathering-fishing to farming, the role of agriculture in the development of social complexity, and the domestication of East Asian crops,” Lee says. “To accomplish these goals, I have conducted fieldwork in several regions in Korea, China, Indonesia, and Vietnam.” She takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work that includes archaeology, cultural anthropology, history, genetics, and environmental sciences.
Lee has been a member of the WOC Project since 2017, where support and mentorship from other WOC members have helped to broaden her thinking about gender in her research.
“WOC helped me to see how gender roles, bias, and preconceptions can limit actual reality and potential, and ever since I’ve been thinking on the data,” Lee said. “Since I was young, as a graduate and PhD student, I thought science is science, data is data. In WOC, I learn more and more with reading other people’s work about gender and sexuality, though I don’t work on that directly. I learn how gender assumptions can limit our thinking about the past and how humans lived through ten-thousand years.”
As WOC convenor, Lee plans to engage in collective decision-making about the direction of the group moving forward. Of concern for her is WOC faculty wellbeing, both academically and personally, as well as WOC representation at UO.
“UO has been improving, but diversity and representation has been an ongoing issue,” Lee says. “Happily, a lot of diverse groups are joining UO, and faculty are going through the stages of promotion. I hope WOC can help them in many ways.”
Lee would also like to see more outreach to WOC graduate students.
“WOC has been a role model and mentor for graduate students, so I’d like to discuss with members how we can further involve, guide, and listen to them in many different sectors,” she said.
The Women of Color Project has been a special initiative under the auspices of CSWS since 2005. The program is comprised of tenure-track women faculty representing all the colleges and schools within the UO. It was initially formed to foster WOC in leadership positions in UO administration.
“It evolved over the years into a vital research, mentoring, and support network for WOC faculty who often find that they are the only one of their kind in their academic units and seek both mentorship and community from fellow colleagues,” Gopal said. “We have also functioned, informally, as a clearing-house for archiving the particular structural and interpersonal challenges that WOC face in their research, teaching, and service in a predominantly white University.”
“I’ve very humbled, honored, and excited to work further with the WOC,” Lee said.
—Jenée Wilde is a senior instructor of English and a research dissemination specialist for CSWS.