News

AlexAnn Westlake, Senior, is the first-ever winner of the $1,000 Jane Higdon Senior Thesis Scholarship.  Following an open competition among UO undergraduates working on a senior thesis on issues related to women and/or gender, the Center for the Study of Women in Society selected Westlake for her research on “Birth Experiences of Women Receiving Care in Private and Public Health Sectors in Valdivia, Chile.”

University of Oregon law professor Michelle McKinley has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her book manuscript, entitled “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1700.”

“Institutional Ethnography,” a talk by Dorothy Smith (delivered November 13, 2009), is now available online.

Dorothy Smith is a major feminist sociologist, theorist, and methodologist. Among her many books are: The Everyday World as Problematic; Conceptual Practices of Power; and Institutional Ethnography: A sociology for people.

October 10, 2009—A couple of days ago I was rushing around the city to get several errands done before sunset. I walked a fast 1.5 miles to an old friend’s office to give him a report by a Mozambican research institute about the coal mining situation and community resettlement fiasco up north in Moatize in Tete province (a Brazilian company has won the rights to run the expansion of the mine).

CSWS was awarded a Ford Foundation grant in March 2008 from the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW). “Diversifying the Leadership of Women’s Research Centers,” was meant to promote the leadership of women of color from historically underrepresented groups in the United States within NCRW and within its women’s research, policy, and advocacy member centers. CSWS and the UO Office of the Vice President for Research provided matching funds.

Shannon Elizabeth Bell is a sociology graduate student with an activist’s heart. In her first grant application to CSWS, Bell noted that women are at the fore of the anti-coal movement in central Appalachia, stepping out of their traditional Appalachian gender roles to take an active leadership position in fighting the coal industry. Her scholarship has a mission—to help these women in low income coal-mining areas of West Virginia find more effective ways to use their voices through grassroots action.

University of Oregon law professor Michelle McKinley has been awarded a Newberry Library Short-Term Resident Fellowship for Individual Research for her work-in-progress titled “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1700.”

Graduate student Ingrid Nelson is one of eight UO students to receive a U.S. Student Program Fulbright award this year. The grant will support her doctoral dissertation research, “Gender Equity and Rural Sustainable Development in Zambézia, Mozambique.”

This documentary by Gabriela Martínez, University of Oregon assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, tells the story of a media takeover that changed the nature of politics, and how we understand media, social movements, and in particular the role of women in both media and social movements.

In order to understand how Professor embodies Oregon’s pioneering spirit, one would first have to understand the grounds upon which Joan herself might object to the stories we typically tell about pioneers and the motivations that led them west. For a woman and a feminist to succeed in the university in the 1960s, at a time when female PhDs and professors were the exception rather than the rule, she needed the kind of determination and hard work we typically associate with pioneers. But Joan’s career and activism were not based on a belief in individualism and isolated success—she did not work in order to stake out acreage for herself and people who looked like her.

Today we went to some Zapotec communities not far from Oaxaca city, accompanied by Beatriz (“Bety”) Cruz, a graduate student from the same region who is studying to be an ethnohistorian. Her thesis, under the guidance of María de los Angeles Romero Frizzi, will have as its focus several manuscripts, including an 18th-century mapa that we are digitizing at WHP for our Mapas Project. Bety arranged with the local town council of Guelacé for us to take a copy of the mapa and walk around the boundaries and sites that appear on the manuscript, marking various coordinates using a GPS instrument. Four town council members accompanied us, helping us locate various boundary points that mark the limits of the community-held lands.

Oaxaca, Mexico—On March 22nd Gabriela Martínez and I went deep into the Mixteca Alta to visit an archive in search of early manuscripts (kind of a bust) and then to go to a pueblo where one of the young women comes from who is on scholarship at our sister-institution, the Casa de la Mujer. Reyna Bautista invited us for lunch and to meet her family. Her mother, Zoila Bautista Hernández, is a monolingual Mixtec speaker. Zoila sat for the video camera and told us a legend about the monolith that towers over the community. In ancient times, it had two parts, a male and a female part.

Oaxaca, Mexico—Yesterday, we began work on a pilot film for a larger documentary on the "triple rescue" of colonial Mexican manuscripts. We are speaking of 16th- through 18th-century indigenous-authored manuscripts that have been decaying on dirt floors in municipal and provincial archives. Besides being subjected to worrisome conditions of humidity, insects, rodents, and grime, these documents have also been ignored and neglected over the centuries in favor of a Eurocentric history. And, the information they contain about the history of Mesoamerican women has suffered even further disparagement. These are manuscripts primarily authored by elite indigenous men about their own activities over the centuries. But, sometimes, almost in spite of their own self-interest, such male authors did mention or paint women into these manuscripts.