Two University of Oregon professors will participate this week in a conference panel in Sydney, Australia, that honors the memory of CSWS founder and long-time director Joan Acker. The panel, titled  "Traveling with Joan: A Panel of Global Feminist Scholarship in Honor of Joan Acker," will take place on the final day of the 10th Biennial Gender, Work & Organisation Conference 2018, to be held at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, June 13 – 16.

Eileen Otis, UO associate professor of sociology, organized the special panel that will honor the work of Joan Acker. Dr. Acker passed away in August 2016 at the age of 92 and was a professor of sociology at UO for nearly three decades.

Eileen Otis (l) with Rhacel Salazar Parreñas at the 2018 CSWS Acker-Morgen Memorial Lecture / photo by Jack Liu.

In addition to Professor Otis, members of the panel commemorating Acker’s work include Lamia Karim, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon and a former CSWS associate director, and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California, who delivered the 2018 CSWS Acker-Morgen Memorial Lecture in March on the UO campus.

Lamia Karim speaks from the audience at the 2018 Acker-Morgen lecture / photo by Jack Liu.Eileen Otis (l) with Rhacel Salazar Parreñas at the 2018 CSWS Acker-Morgen Memorial Lecture / photo by Jack Liu.

Eileen Otis will speak on her research, “Outsourcing Feminism: Value Chains, Neoliberalism and Walmart.” Lamia Karim will talk about her research “Precarity and Everyday Lives of Workers: Garment Workers in Bangladesh.” And Rhacel Parrenas will speak on “The Gendered Organization of Migrant Domestic Work.”

In additional panels, Otis will also speak about “Bridgework: Globalization, gender, and labor at a U.S. luxury hotel in Beijing.”