by Sangita Gopal, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema Studies

CSWS turns 50 in AY 2023-24! We invite you to a thrilling year of events themed “Feminist Futures” that look to the future while commemorating the past. We will celebrate the cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship on gender and intersectionality that the Center has sponsored and disseminated for five decades, and showcase feminist collaborations across the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology that imagine feminist futures to negotiate the challenges of the next fifty. 

And those challenges are formidable—from recent US Supreme Court decisions on abortion and affirmative action that have rolled back decades of feminist action to the war on people of color, migrants, refugees, and LGBTQ+ populations, from escalating violence against women globally to the rise of masculinist nationalisms worldwide, from an accelerating climate catastrophe to a rapid erosion of public institutions and the rule of law. These complex and entangled problems must be confronted again—as they have been before—with passion, empathy, creativity, and compassion, and in that spirit of collaboration that is a central tenet of the ethical project of feminism. 

Thus our programming all year long is structured by collaborations across disciplines, approaches, methodologies, and audiences. Foregrounding scholarship, creative projects, mentorship, performance, and skill-building, we at CSWS imagine “Feminist Futures” as assembled through data, research, experiments, conversations, dreams, visions, capacity building, and concrete actions. It has been such an honor to collaborate with colleagues in the different schools, colleges, and centers across the university along with artists, makers, scholars, and most importantly students in communities both local and global to bring you art exhibits, performances, film screenings, concerts, lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and curations that imagine the perils and promises of feminist futures. 

The themes and concerns that weave through our 50th-year programming were previewed this Spring through two events. The first was a book talk by Associate Professor Krystale Littlejohn, our colleague in sociology whose seminal monograph Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics (University of California Press, 2021) is widely regarded as a landmark publication that resets the conversation on reproductive justice. The second was a two-week-long event series entitled Haunting Ecologies: The Past, Present, and Future of Feminist and Indigenous Approaches to Forest Fire, where we partnered with the Provost’s Initiative on the Environment, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Center for Environmental Futures, and the Just Futures project, as well as various units on campus. Over 500 people attended Haunting Ecologies including several class visits to the exhibits. It was gratifying to know that after the solitary years of the pandemic, these collaborative events allowed us to re-engage the CSWS community and bring in new constituents. We hope that this enthusiastic reception is a prelude for this coming year. 

We have a full slate of events planned (see back cover), but there are two that I would especially like to put on your radar. As you will remember, CSWS was founded by a generous endowment in memory of early feminist Jane Grant, a journalist who helped to co-found The New Yorker magazine. We wanted to honor her association with the magazine by inviting—with the School of Journalism and Communication—its legendary former editor Tina Brown to speak at UO. Brown’s visit is scheduled for Feb. 27, 2024. 
On May 9, 2024, we will close out the year with the Lorwin Lecture on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties featuring lawyer, educator, author, and feminist icon Dr. Anita Hill. Here we joined forces with the Wayne Morse Center to bring to our communities a keynote address that covers the wide range of our anniversary themes—from reproductive justice and the rule of law to domestic violence that are once again at the core of any agenda for feminist futures.

Thank you all for your unwavering support to the Center as we have labored for  five decades to fund and promote research and creative work deeply anchored in feminist inquiry, intersectional frameworks, and social justice. While our constituents have been primarily faculty and graduate students, these past few years have convinced us that we must increase support for another core group—UO undergraduates—whose passion for and engagement with what we do here has been most humbling. Whether it is by volunteering time for our events, asking searching questions at talks, or seeking out unpaid internships, there is an upswell of interest among undergraduates in feminist futures that is very motivating. 

Thus we decided, with encouragement from our advisory board and associates, to dedicate a DuckFunder Campaign on the occasion of our 50th to two projects that are targeted to undergraduate research and skill-building. The first—co-funded by the Calderwood Foundation—sponsors an undergraduate seminar that trains students in public-facing discourse on socially divisive issues, while the second funds research teams comprised of undergraduates and faculty advisors focused on projects that explore the intersections of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) with gender as an important analytic frame. Our goal is ambitious—$50,000 for both projects—but with your support and encouragement, we are confident we will get there! Perhaps a gift—maybe even a seed grant—will be your way of helping our undergraduates realize their feminist futures. If this interests you, please reach out to us with any questions you might have (sgopal@uoregon.edu). 

Jane Grant’s generosity saw us through these past five decades, and as we look forward to the next five, we are so excited to widen this network of support to a new generation of feminists and allies. Much gratitude to you for sharing this journey, and looking forward to many connections in this coming year! 

—Sangita Gopal is an associate professor of cinema studies and director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society.