by Alice Evans, Managing Editor, CSWS Annual Review

When Michelle McKinley applied for the position of CSWS director earlier this year, an academic colleague exclaimed in ironic surprise: “But you hate administration!” It seems a fair question, then, to ask Dr. McKinley—law school professor, human rights lawyer, cultural anthropologist, mother of four children, caretaker of her own father, and an obviously busy and committed human being—why she took on the administration of an academic research center.

“I don’t regard this job as administration,” McKinley said. “Because I regard CSWS as a community. I want to keep on building and strengthening our community.”

Michelle McKinley started out in Jamaica, daughter of a government official and a strong-willed, traditional mother. One of many children growing up in both a political family and a matriarchal household ruled by her mother and a host of aunts, McKinley attended private school and was ready to leave the island and go to college at age sixteen—but first she had to negotiate with her mother. “My mother was hesitant about sending a girl-child away to the U.S.,” she said, adding that several brothers had already gone to college in the States. Finally her mother warmed to the idea but would only allow her to go to a women’s college. “She was taken by the Wellesley profile,” McKinley said, adding that her parents followed her to the States, but not too closely, as they “didn’t like the cold.”

After Wellesley came another year home in Jamaica with her parents. McKinley applied to the London School of Economics, but again, she had to negotiate with her mother. “My mother didn’t want me to go there; she said too many Communists went there. And if I was going to go away again, the only place she would let me go was Oxford. And so I said okay. I went to Oxford to study anthropology.”

McKinley completed a master’s degree in anthropology from Oxford University, during which time she did fieldwork in Jamaica. She also married another anthropology graduate student, and together they started visiting the Amazon region of Latin America and doing fieldwork there. Her husband entered a doctoral program at Harvard, they moved to the United States, and McKinley took on the role of working wife and mother, supporting her husband while he got his PhD. She worked as a secretary, worked on a project on criminal justice reform in Guatemala, and did fieldwork with her husband during summers. 

“The way that I got into law school was interesting,” she commented. “I was doing all this anthropology. There was a feeling that people were racing against time to preserve their way of life because the oil companies, and the mining companies, and the logging companies were coming in. We were working in the way that archaeologists do salvage archaeology before a highway comes in. It was kind of like that—to salvage, to document language. At some point one of the elders said to me, ‘Enough of this anthropology stuff. We need lawyers. That’s what we need.’”

McKinley’s mother had also encouraged McKinley to take up the law, “because I was precocious, and always arguing stuff… and somehow, the law, she thought it was something where I would be secure.” Additionally, the work McKinley had done on the criminal justice project in Guatemala, she said, “had showed me there were things that I could do. And so I went to law school.”

McKinley graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1995. During her time there she served as executive editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. “The human rights program at Harvard Law School was kind of an oasis in what was a large, impersonal law school,” she said. “I still have friends from that program.” 

“When you are an assistant professor and you are trying really hard to establish yourself as a scholar, find your own voice, and be a presence in the classroom, you really need other people in that journey.  You need support.… Without the Women of Color Project, we wouldn’t have been able to articulate our particular predicaments and had each other’s back in the way that we do.”

McKinley also took time off during her law school studies to have a child. After law school, she worked for a year as a director at Cultural Survival, a nonprofit started by a small group of Harvard professors that was trying to address issues facing aboriginal peoples worldwide. McKinley was brought in to help the organization negotiate its debt, which had mounted up following rapid expansion and growth created by money brought in through marketing ventures. “It’s every nonprofit’s dream that you have a profit-making part to support the work and research and advocacy,” McKinley explained. But the products being developed and marketed, such as Ben and Jerry’s Rain Forest Crunch, had “little to do with the founding mission as an advocacy group for indigenous and First Nation and aboriginal peoples,” she said. The nonprofit had set up cooperatives but hadn’t made a plan for how to supply and satisfy a growing need for sustainable sources for basic materials such as Brazil nuts. The nonprofit had never planned for the kind of growth it was experiencing. They brought McKinley in to help them negotiate their debt. “I helped them a lot through a transitional year,” she said.

Meanwhile, she was awarded an Echoing Green Fellowship. “They called themselves investors in social change entrepreneurs,” McKinley said. “They funded you 100 percent the first year, 50 percent the second year, and 25 and 25 the last two years. The idea was that you had to get your funding base secured in order both to institutionalize and to make your organization effective.” 
McKinley named her start-up nonprofit the Amazonian People’s Resources Initiative (APRI). Headquartered in Peru, she spent nine years there protecting reproductive rights of indigenous women. In the big push to think about poverty reduction through forced sterilization, rural Andean and Amazonian women were undergoing coercive tubal ligations at the hands of the Peruvian Ministry of Health. McKinley helped craft an initiative that cited as a fundamental principle: “the ability to make reasonable reproductive health decisions is dependent on the exercise of all human rights—civil, political, economic, social, and cultural.”

Due to the nature of the Echoing Green Fellowship, McKinley knew from day one that she wanted to “write myself out of a job. I knew that particularly when you’re working overseas and you’re interested in social justice work, and you come from outside, you have to build capacity inside. Early on I founded a local organization with a Peruvian partner who I then worked with in collaboration and partnership. I transferred a lot of skills I had to her, especially when it came to fundraising. So they are now fully funded. Over time, I could get away from the fundraising role and do more program development. What they wanted to do on their end was build capacity among the women in the communities that we were working in so that the programs could be run by the participants. It was exciting and eye-opening for me, and really empowering.”

McKinley’s Peruvian work partner received an Ashoka Fellowship, which funded her for four years. “With that we got funding from the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, from Turner … those were some of the bigger names.”

By now McKinley had spent almost ten years in Peru. “It was time for me to move on. I had done what I set out to do. I had become more interested in becoming an academic. I had also gotten divorced.”

She moved into the academic world, took a job as a visiting professor at the University of Kansas, and then landed her first tenure-track job at the University of Oregon School of Law.

McKinley established her connection to the Center for the Study of Women in Society even before her arrival on campus as an assistant professor of law in 2007—and she has nurtured and been nurtured by it ever since. Recruited out of Kansas by a team that included then-UO law school dean Margie Paris, then-CSWS interim director Linda Fuller, and then-Wayne Morse Center director Margaret Hallock, McKinley described her first visit to the University of Oregon as one that provided a “really soft landing.”
“Dean Paris and Linda Fuller knew that CSWS would be a good community for me,” McKinley recalled. “CSWS had a drop-in for me where I could meet other scholars. I met Peggy Pascoe, whose work I had really enjoyed, and Carlos Aguirre. These were among the people that I was able to draw upon in a community of interdisciplinary scholarship.” 

Immediately appointed to the CSWS advisory board after her hire, McKinley served on the team that conducted a national search for a new CSWS director that brought in Carol Stabile. McKinley stayed active with the advisory board, moving on and off the board only when she was away from the campus for the various fellowships she began racking up. But first came a series of CSWS mentoring efforts that have had a lasting impact on her career. 

The “community of interdisciplinary scholarship” in which she had landed brought her strong friendships among colleagues, particularly through the research interest group (RIG) model and the Women of Color Project. The RIGs, started in 1994 by Sandra Morgen when she served as CSWS director, gave McKinley an immediate structure within which to visit and explore her direction as a scholar. The long-running Américas RIG, for example, held a direct connection to McKinley’s previous experience as an anthropologist doing research in the Amazon, and later, as a human rights lawyer working first for an international nonprofit and later as director of a nonprofit in Peru. 

Within the Women of Color (WOC) Project, housed at CSWS and originally funded in 2008 by a Ford Foundation Grant from the National Council for Research on Women, McKinley found another sort of home. Coordinated by Lynn Fujiwara, then an associate professor in both the Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies, the WOC Project started out with about eight to ten members who were mostly junior professors—and women of color.

“At that point, when you are an assistant professor and you are trying really hard to establish yourself as a scholar, find your own voice, and be a presence in the classroom, you really need other people in that journey. You need support,” McKinley said. “We really didn’t have the support of a lot of other people in our academic units. We wouldn’t have known that each of us was confronting what we were confronting if we didn’t have a forum that brought us all together. Carol Stabile was important for providing a space for assistant professors, but having the Women of Color Project talk about advancement, leadership, and all of that really opened up those forums to us. Without the Women of Color Project, we wouldn’t have been able to articulate our particular predicaments and had each other’s back in the way that we do.”   

Additionally, McKinley lauded the writing and promotion workshops that Stabile put together in 2010 and 2011, which yielded national prizes to several of the participants who workshopped their papers, including McKinley. The workshop benefitted her work on a manuscript that also received funding in 2009, 2011, and 2015 from CSWS faculty research grants. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700, is due out in September 2016 from Cambridge University Press. It is a 300-page tome ten years in the making that “uses the lens of legal history and legal anthropology to examine litigation undertaken by Peruvian slaves in seventeenth century ecclesiastical courts.”  

“Because I’m not a historian, a lot of people asked me how I did this,” McKinley commented. “I tell people about how I got into the archive.” It was in 2005, when McKinley was doing a research project on human reproductive rights and at the end of her time working as director of the Amazonian People’s Resources Initiative. “What I was looking at was that Peru had enacted a very progressive family violence law. And I wanted to see how women were finding ways to bring claims of domestic abuse and neglect. And rather than using human rights language, they were using a deeply religious discourse, of suffering and deservedness, and all of that. I was curious … and then I started to look at old petitions. I got captivated by these petitions.”

McKinley garnered support from different foundations to visit archives. “I think the reason it got so much support is because I tell a story that people don’t expect,” McKinley explained. “People expect that the condition of slavery is enough to stand in for the life experiences. That is, it just sort of stops there. I don’t tell that story. I tell the story of people who are enslaved, but they’re also doing other things and living their lives. The book is called Fractional Freedoms, because what I say is that nobody is ever truly autonomous. Everybody is embedded and intertwined in these relationships. And people’s worlds are small and contained social environments. Slaves live in the same households, they worship in the same churches, they do a lot of work in monasteries. It’s a small world. And when they do move, they move together. That’s the approach of the book. It’s about intimacy and domestic relations, intimacy and economy. I ask, How did intimacy shape slavery? And how did slavery shape intimacy?”

Among the awards and fellowships this research brought her, in addition to three CSWS research grants and the Surrency Prize she garnered in 2011 for the article vetted at the CSWS writing and promotion workshop, McKinley pulled in fellowships from the Oregon Humanities Center, the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, and a series of national awards, including ones from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Newberry Library. In 2014, she was a fellow in residence at Princeton University's Program in Law and Public Affairs, which allowed her the time and space she needed to complete her book.

Now that she’s in between major projects, McKinley has gladly taken on the role of director for the research center to which she has been connected for so long. She cites several leadership areas that she hopes to strengthen, expand, and continue. 
For one, she would like to increase funding for faculty research. “I think we’re good talent scouts … and we are true seed funders. We get an idea, and see how it can grow … that little acorn can be a big oak tree … that’s what I really want to emphasize to the broader community. A lot of research proposals that CSWS funds, people will not find funding for otherwise. Humanists might go and get NEH grants, but the CSWS research grants get young faculty into the mindset of finding support and sponsorship for their research.”

“I’m also drawn to themes,” she said, “and I’d like to see us work around themes: issues of inequality and economic precarity in a neoliberal environment, for example. Immigration policies. Those things have direct impact on women’s lives and on gender relationships, so I’m interested in seeing that in a robust set of research activities. Because I have an international background, I’m also interested in linking up with gender studies centers in other places such as Nigeria, India, and Argentina, and seeing how they’re doing and what they’re doing. I want to see if we can have a set of collaborations or conversations about the differences and similarities within the ways that we work.”

McKinley said she also wants CSWS “to serve as a landing point for people going into feminist scholarship … a visiting professorship or a post doc. I’d like that to be an open national and international position, so that we can read people’s applications and give them time to develop their scholarly agendas before they go into their first teaching job.”

She also wants to improve the ability of CSWS “to innovate, respond, and be a strong voice for issues of gender equality and issues that the campus faces.” As examples, McKinley cites the recent hiring of the spate of deans throughout the university, and “the appalling number of senior women of color in the professorate. There are only two full professors at UO who are women of color.”

Mentorship also ranks high on her list of priorities for the center. McKinley makes it clear that she has relied on mentorship in her own growth, in all kinds of ways, whether in motherhood, academics, fundraising, or running a center. “You can’t do this on your own, and you should be able to rely on a network of people to help you, advise you,” she said. 

In reference to her own mentors, McKinley said she’s had many, but the mentor who stands out most is her mother, who died in 2008 not long after her arrival at UO. “The older I get, the more I appreciate my mom so much. It’s funny because we had a contentious relationship while she was alive. But she was formative in a lot of ways … not as a scholar, but as a parent and as a woman. Her words still come back to me. That would be my constant mentor. I wasn’t in academia for a long time. I was a lawyer, and I was an anthropologist, so I’ve had many mentors. Professional mentors, and even mentors who helped me be a parent because I didn’t know how to do that. I think that’s why I take mentorship so seriously, because it can make a lot of difference in many ways, especially when you are in a field where you might otherwise be lonely.”

Being director of CSWS does not mean giving up her teaching duties. McKinley will teach two classes in the School of Law’s undergraduate legal studies program this year, and one JD class.

For all that she already has on her plate—teaching, research, family duties—it is her new assignment with CSWS that has her pumped. “I think it’s a great time for CSWS,” McKinley said. “We have a new operations manager, and we have a lot of energy. We’re ready to get to work.”   

—Alice Evans is managing editor of the CSWS Annual Review and serves as the CSWS research dissemination specialist. She also coordinates the CSWS Northwest Women Writers Symposium.