CSWS Annual Review

Q: You grew up in Indiana—where?
Indianapolis. I went to Shortridge High School, then to DePauw University in Greencastle for one year and couldn’t stand it so I dropped out. The war started and it was much more interesting to work. I worked in a radio station; I was the person who chose the music for the disc jockeys. I had several hundred dollars to spend. What I did was go to the record stores and buy records. That was the end of my career in that regard. Then I moved to New York. I really did not like Indiana; I found it racist, although I did not know much about racism yet.

by Lynn Fujiwara, Associate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies
In March 2008, CSWS was awarded a Ford Foundation grant from the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW). The aim of the grant, “Diversifying the Leadership of Women’s Research Centers,” was 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. The project specifically designed for CSWS was to address the current and historical absence of women of color in leadership positions at the center.

by Carol A. Stabile, Director, CSWS
I suspect that I sound like a dinosaur when I talk to my students about typing my undergraduate honors thesis on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter—a model that boasted a cartridge with built-in correcto-tape. I was reminded of the gap between my students’ experiences of media and mine last year, when I showed my students an episode of the sitcom The Goldbergs from 1951, and Gertrude Berg made a sales pitch for RCA televisions based on the product’s ability to eliminate “snow.”

Gender Roles in Rural Entrepreneurship: A Bolivian Experience
Presenter: Alejandra Garcia, master’s student, UO Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management; M.A. Gender and Women Studies, Armstrong Atlantic State University.
The focus of my research is to bring to light the efforts and struggles of indigenous Bolivian women in rural areas. I provide testimony of some of the inequalities along gender lines in Bolivia. In particular, I focus on women’s struggle to become more independent by being entrepreneurs while still being able to be good wives and mothers.

by René Kladzyk, Department of Geography
July 16, 2010: I squeeze into a bar in El Paso that sits near the university, a ten-minute drive from the downtown “Paso del Norte” bridge—a thirty-minute walk. It is a Friday night, and all the kids here are from Juárez. It is hot, loud, and packed—barely room to stand, let alone dance or hold a conversation. My friend Inez and I shout at one another—she too is from Juárez, and seems to know everyone. It’s a big city, but this is a small enough scene, I presume.

by Miriam Abelson, Department of Sociology
When I told people of my proposed research project with transgender people in the Southeast I met with disbelief from many quarters. That disbelief stemmed from the idea that there were few, if any, transgender people in the Southeast and that those that lived there must live in such constant fear that they would never expose themselves by consenting to an interview.

by Margaret Hallock, Director, Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics
Dr. Vandana Shiva, internationally respected author and activist, visited the UO as occupant of the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics during winter quarter 2011. She headlined a major conference on Food Justice: Community, Equity and Sustainability sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics and cosponsored by CSWS.

by Ingrid L. Nelson, Department of Geography
Slow-growing miombo woodlands, which have supported rural Mozambicans with fuel, food, and fodder for centuries, are being decimated by two recently emerging global forces: China’s illegal timber extraction, and the indirect impacts of large-scale land acquisition by transnational corporations, especially for biofuel and fast-growing monoculture eucalyptus plantations. This is altering the sustainability of and ownership rights over thousands of hectares of forest and farmland.

by Louise M. Bishop, Associate Professor of Literature, Robert D. Clark Honors College
I’m of a generation—maybe there are others of you, and maybe it’s not as generational as I might think—where we “made do” with whatever sorts of academic career we could cobble together. Sometimes it could mean trailing a spouse, sometimes it could mean working in a non-tenure-track position, sometimes both; always it seemed to mean that there was no local automatically—and immediately—available berth to support the intellectual growth and research that a PhD seemed to promise.