CSWS Annual Review

Marjorie Celona / photo by Bettina Strauss

Counterblast: Excerpt from O. Henry Winner

by Marjorie Celona, Assistant Professor, UO Creative Writing Program

A 2018 O. Henry Award winner, Marjorie Celona’s short story “Counterblast” first appeared in The Southern Review Permission to reprint this excerpt was given by the author. You can read the story in its entirety in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 (September 2018, Anchor).

Walidah Imarisha / photo by Jack Liu

A Conversation with Walidah Imarisha

Interviewed by Alice Evans, CSWS Managing Editor; Michelle McKinley, CSWS Director and Professor, School of Law; and Dena Zaldúa, CSWS Operations Manager

Joy Harjo/ photo by Jack Liu

A Year in Review: 2018–19

by Dena Zaldúa, Operations Manager, CSWS

Last fall, we were still reeling from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on the University of Virginia campus when the school year began. Few of us in the CSWS family could believe this was really happening. If only that had been our nadir. During the 2017-18 academic year, we have seen children separated from their parents at the border and incarcerated in cages. 

A black and white image of a crowd in a room with "San Fransisco Transgender Film Festival" projected on a screen

Minor Genre, Major Revolution: Queer & Punk Histories of the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival (1997-2017)

by Andrew Robbins, PhD Candidate, Media Studies, School of Journalism and Communication

With funding from a CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant, I was able to travel to the GLBT Historical Society Archive in San Francisco in November 2018 to explore the unsorted collection of “Tranny Fest,” the original name of what is now known as the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. The collection was donated by the festival’s original co-founders, media lawyer Alex Austin and late filmmaker Christopher Lee, who started the festival in 1997. 

Patients at the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia are all treated free of charge: copyright: WHO/P. Virot /2012.

A Study of NGOs’ Strategies To End Fistula in Senegal

by Layire Diop, PhD Candidate, Media Studies, School of Journalism and Communication

The figures released by the World Health Organization (WHO) are staggering. Even though fistula was eliminated in developed countries a century ago, it still affects two million women around the world (WHO, 2018). 

Planting for food and jobs in Ghana.

On the Backs of Women: Participatory Communication for Livelihood Empowerment of Women under Ghana’s ‘Planting for Food and Jobs’ Program

by Elinam Amevor, PhD Student, School of Journalism and Communication

The nineteenth century colonial legacy of the British in the Gold Coast—now Ghana—which ensured that men produce cash crops for export to keep the engines of the Industrial Revolution running, while women engage in food-crop production to feed the home, continues to determine the gendered nature of Ghana’s agricultural sector in the twenty-first century.