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CSWS Impact Report
This follow-up to our 50th anniversary shares impact from five decades of our history, research, programming, and advocacy at the University of Oregon.
Feminist Futures
Ducks Rise to Support Undergraduate STEAM Fellowships at CSWS
Fundraising on the 2026 University of Oregon annual day of giving surpassed our $5,000 goal to support Undergraduate STEAM Summer Fellowships, which create opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaborations among science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) faculty and students on campus and enhance pathways for underrepresented students in STEAM to succeed. Through a competitive application process, CSWS selected biochemistry major Claire Jones and dance major Michelle Rogers as our 2026 STEAM Fellows.
Community Collaborations
Feminist Futures: Moments from the CSWS 50th Anniversary
Right from the start, CSWS leaders, affiliates, and collaborators imagined our 50th anniversary as an opportunity to reach beyond the usual partnerships. From the UO Environmental Initiative to the School of Music and Dance, and from UO Common Reading to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, we built a program of events that speak to the ways that intersectional feminism informs research, scholarship, and creative production across the University of Oregon and shapes our collective visions of social justice.
Advocacy
New Special Project Advocates for Institutional Change: CSWS Leads an Effort to Redress Pandemic Impacts for Faculty who are Caregivers
In June 2020, CSWS launched the Caregiver Campaign with an open letter to university leadership, the Senate, deans, department heads, and United Academics urgently requesting policy changes to ameliorate impacts of the pandemic for caregivers in the UO community.
Our Mission
Supporting Women of Color at UO: A Look into the Center's Long-Running Faculty Mentorship Program
The Women of Color (WOC) Project has been a special project under the auspices of CSWS since 2005. The program is comprised of tenure-track women faculty, and our collective has approximately 50 participants, of whom about 30 are active constituents. We represent all the colleges and schools within the UO.
Jane Grant Fellow: Malvya Chintakindi
The 2025 Jane Grant Dissertation Fellow Malvya Chintakindi talks about her anthropological research on women in India's informal labor markets and the impact of the CSWS fellowship for her work. The prestigious Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship, honoring Jane Grant—early feminist and wife of CSWS’s benefactor William Harris—is given annually to an outstanding scholar writing a dissertation on women and gender.
STEAM Fellowship Impact: Sophia Foerster
2025 CSWS Undergraduate STEAM Summer Research Fellow Sophia Foerster and faculty mentor Nick Willett speak about the importance and impact of the fellowship.
Alumni Highlight: Envisioning Feminist Futures
For our 50th anniversary, we invited CSWS research grant alumni to give testimonials about the impacts of CSWS on their lives and their careers, and to answer the question: What do Feminist Futures mean to you?
CSWS Graduate Student Research
When the English breaks: art y etnografia in the margins of the state
by Kaito Campos de Novais, PhD Candidate, Anthropology
The more I encounter other Latine artistas, more I learn about what is possible to say, write, and create under political precarity. There is a common force affecting both our crafts (arte and etnografia) which is state repression. With these interlocutors I share not only vivências of diaspora, but also the struggle to self-express under conditions of silencing. During interviews and daily interactions, I am constantly listening to stories that never quite finish, hesitations, and... Something unclear, often called “climate,” “news,” “what’s happening,” something hunting us, about to knock our doors, about to stop us on traffic, something I can’t quite name, gets disappeared.
The more I encounter other Latine artistas, more I learn about what is possible to say, write, and create under political precarity. There is a common force affecting both our crafts (arte and etnografia) which is state repression. With these interlocutors I share not only vivências of diaspora, but also the struggle to self-express under conditions of silencing. During interviews and daily interactions, I am constantly listening to stories that never quite finish, hesitations, and... Something unclear, often called “climate,” “news,” “what’s happening,” something hunting us, about to knock our doors, about to stop us on traffic, something I can’t quite name, gets disappeared.
Feminist Environmental Justice in Practice: Women as Agents of Change in the Niger Delta's Oil Conflict
by Oyeintarimoboere Azebi, Master of Arts, Department of Global Studies
In 2002, in an oil field in the Niger Delta, 200 to 300 women, farmers, mothers, and grandmothers from the Ijaw and Itsekiri villages walked onto a Chevron exploration site and simply refused to leave. They had no weapons. Their only threat was one that struck terror into the company’s representatives: they undressed, and, in their culture, for a woman to bare herself before men who have wronged her community is an act of profound, irreversible shame upon those men. This demonstration lasted ten days, after which Chevron promised to build new schools, clinics, and provide jobs for their husbands and sons. By 2003, none had materialized.
In 2002, in an oil field in the Niger Delta, 200 to 300 women, farmers, mothers, and grandmothers from the Ijaw and Itsekiri villages walked onto a Chevron exploration site and simply refused to leave. They had no weapons. Their only threat was one that struck terror into the company’s representatives: they undressed, and, in their culture, for a woman to bare herself before men who have wronged her community is an act of profound, irreversible shame upon those men. This demonstration lasted ten days, after which Chevron promised to build new schools, clinics, and provide jobs for their husbands and sons. By 2003, none had materialized.
Beyond the Reproductive Gaze: Producing Knowledge, Resistance, and Relief through Nigerian Women's Narratives of Endometriosis
by Precious Adejumobi, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology
“They said the ‘dirty blood’ will come out when I give birth,” 33-year-old Fola (pseudonym) shared with fresh realization of the false hope she was offered about 20 years ago. She anticipated childbirth as a potential source of relief from her debilitating menstrual cramps, but experienced disappointment when confronted with infertility, another symptom of endometriosis.
“They said the ‘dirty blood’ will come out when I give birth,” 33-year-old Fola (pseudonym) shared with fresh realization of the false hope she was offered about 20 years ago. She anticipated childbirth as a potential source of relief from her debilitating menstrual cramps, but experienced disappointment when confronted with infertility, another symptom of endometriosis.
CSWS Faculty Fellows: Research and Creative Work
Seeking Justice for Gendered Violence: Courts, Communities, and Care in Guatemala
From the publisher: “Guatemala is one of the first countries in Latin America to codify femicide as a crime and establish separate, victim-centric institutions of justice specializing in Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), including specialized courts and public prosecutors. Despite these pathbreaking legal reforms, Indigenous women in Guatemala face formidable barriers to seeking justice and escaping the multiple, overlapping forms of violence that they confront.
Publication
2026
The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life
"As we see the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene proliferate, advanced technologies also grant us greater access to the furthest reaches of the world’s oceans, facilitating the discovery of countless new species. Sorting through the implications of this strange paradox, Stacy Alaimo explores the influence this newfound intimacy with the deep sea might have on our broader relationship to the nonhuman world."
Publication
2025
The Master-Servant Doctrine: How Old Legal Rules Haunt the Modern Workplace
“The field of employment law used to be called ‘master-servant law.’ Even if this term has fallen out of favor, a central truth has not changed: modern employment law still draws on centuries-old ideas about the rights and obligations of workers. In The Master-Servant Doctrine, Elizabeth Chika Tippett combines historical context with contemporary case studies and interviews to reveal how modern law and management practices are steeped in three core master-servant principles: the right to control, the right to govern, and the duty of support. With each chapter tackling a different aspect of the workplace—including pay, time management, firing, and benefits—this startling and original story of employment law offers fresh insights for legal scholars, historians, attorneys, advocates, and anyone who's ever worked a terrible job.”
Publication
2025
California Medieval: Nearly a Nun in 1960s San Francisco
"California Medieval is an intriguing hybrid memoir, interspersed with poetry, song, and lyrical vignettes. It explores the world of a Franciscan convent during the heyday of the 1960s in San Francisco at the birth of the flower-power era, as seen through the eyes of a novitiate nun, newly arrived in the Bay Area from a rural community in southwestern Washington State. This book is a stylistically and structurally adventurous narrative that forms a literary intersection of music, spirituality, nature, sociology, and sexuality."
Publication
2024
Faculty and Student Impacts
New Faculty Welcome Interview with Dr. Ernesto Martinez
New Faculty Welcome Interview with CSWS Faculty Affiliates
2025 Research Fellows: Audrey Lucero
2026 CSWS Research Interest Groups