I started as director of CSWS in the summer of 2016. Sadly for us, CSWS lost two of our founding mothers within months of each other in 2016. Joan Acker and Sandi Morgen, pathbreaking feminist titans, made the Center a focus of research and activism around women’s economic rights and security for over forty years.

In late May, CSWS concluded its three-year focus on “Women and Work” by joining with the recently renamed Department of Indigenous, Race, & Ethnic Studies in a celebration of the publication of a book that had its origins in Hendricks hallowed hallways. Shireen Roshanravan was doing post-doctorate work in the Women and Gender Studies Program at UO during 2009-10 with the mentorship of Lynn Fujiwara—now an associate professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, & Ethnic Studies at UO—when they began a collaborative relationship in their shared focus on Women of Color feminisms.

V Varun Chaudhry worked as a CSWS pro tem research assistant during AY 2018-19 while completing his dissertation through the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University.  He is now an instructor in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Brandeis University. V’s research focuses on the institutionalization of “transgender” in nonprofit and funding agencies through ethnographic research in Philadelphia, PA.

An anthropological study of female workers in the global apparel industry in Bangladesh uncovers a zero-sum game. Aged out by 40 with worn-out bodies and younger workers ready to take their place, women often have little or no savings to sustain them.

by Lamia Karim, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology

Interviewed by Michelle McKinley, CSWS Director and Professor, School of Law, and Alice Evans, CSWS Managing Editor 

 With a new book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, Angela Joya is pressing forward with more projects focused on the Middle East and North Africa. An assistant professor in the UO Department of International Studies, Joya was born in Afghanistan, lived for twelve years as a refugee in Pakistan, and immigrated with her family to Canada when she was sixteen.

Q :Tell us about your book project.  

by Nicole Giuliani, Assistant Professor, School Psychology Program

by Alaí Reyes-Santos, Associate Professor, Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, and 
Ana-Maurine Lara, Assistant Professor, Department of  Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

by Mayra Bottaro, Assistant Professor, Department of Romance Languages

By Maria Fernanda Escallón, Assistant Professor Department of Anthropology

by Celeste Reeb, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English

[gentle harpsichord jingle] [music reminiscent of the Jaws theme playing] [exotic percussive music]

by Elinam Amevor, PhD Student, School of Journalism and Communication

The nineteenth century colonial legacy of the British in the Gold Coast—now Ghana—which ensured that men produce cash crops for export to keep the engines of the Industrial Revolution running, while women engage in food-crop production to feed the home, continues to determine the gendered nature of Ghana’s agricultural sector in the twenty-first century. 

by Layire Diop, PhD Candidate, Media Studies, School of Journalism and Communication

The figures released by the World Health Organization (WHO) are staggering. Even though fistula was eliminated in developed countries a century ago, it still affects two million women around the world (WHO, 2018). 

by Peter P. Ehlinger, PhD Student, Counseling Psychology, College of Education

“They’re tired of waiting for things that aren’t going to come.” — Non-cisgender student

“I drank a lot as a young teenager…I think a lot of that came from a strong sense of lack of belonging and social anxiety.” — Non-cisgender student

by Andrew Robbins, PhD Candidate, Media Studies, School of Journalism and Communication

With funding from a CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant, I was able to travel to the GLBT Historical Society Archive in San Francisco in November 2018 to explore the unsorted collection of “Tranny Fest,” the original name of what is now known as the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. The collection was donated by the festival’s original co-founders, media lawyer Alex Austin and late filmmaker Christopher Lee, who started the festival in 1997.