CSWS Annual Review

by Anita Weiss, Professor and Head, Department of International Studies
The majestic Valley of Swat has endured many challenges and transformations in its storied history, but none may have the lasting impact on space and society as the occupation of the area by the Pakistan Taliban in the mid-2000s and the subsequent invasion by the Pakistan military to root them out in May 2009. The winding road to Swat, up through the Malakand Pass in the Provincially Administered Tribal Area (PATA) of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, makes for a formidable barrier from the rest of Pakistan.

by Lamia Karim, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, and Associate Director, Center for the Study of Women in Society
In 2009, I went to Bangladesh with a National Science Foundation research grant to conduct four months of ethnographic research among a group of women who belonged to a pietist movement known as Tablighi Jama’at. The Tablighi Jama’at is a global missionary movement that was started by Muhammad Ilyas in 1926 in India. It is a spiritual movement that seeks to bring Muslim conduct in line with the life and teachings of Prophet Muhammad.

Sangita Gopal, recently tenured associate professor of English, grew up in Calcutta and moved to the United States to attend graduate school at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, where she studied literary theory and film studies. She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 2004. Her book Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, is due out in fall 2011 from the University of Chicago Press. She coedited the book Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Gopal & Moorti, University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

by Bryna Goodman, Professor of History and Director of Asian Studies
On September 8, 1922, a mysterious and inexplicable suicide took place in Shanghai’s International Settlement, the Anglo-American-dominated foreign enclave that constituted one territorial authority in a city of multiple and fragmented jurisdictions. A young female secretary who worked at the liberal, politically outspoken Shanghai Chinese newspaper, the Journal of Commerce, was found hanged on the premises. Discovering her missing at an office dinner, a coworker summoned her family members and pushed open the office door, finding her dangling from the cord of an electric teakettle that had been looped around a window frame.

by Lidiana Soto, master’s candidate, UO School of Journalism and Communication
Everything about how we physically crossed the border is like snapshots. Small vignettes and blurry, patchy, unreliable memories. We left the village in southern Oaxaca under a waning gibbous moon. My mother woke me in the middle of the night, wrapped me up in a blanket, and carried me onto the bus. I called the driver manejador and my mother chuckled and corrected me; chófer she said as she held on to my six-month-old brother. I settled onto the bench seat and watched the moon light the dark landscape as we drove away from Santa Maria Tindu.

by Danielle Seid, PhD candidate, Department of English
Over winter break, I had a chance to speak with lifelong entertainer Sue Kim, one of three sisters in the musical girl group the Kim Sisters. A few years after the Korean War, in 1959, the group—Sue, Mia, and Ai-Ja— arrived in the United States as “cultural ambassadors” from the Republic of Korea. They were immediately booked on the highest-rated television variety shows at the time, most prominently The Ed Sullivan Show (1948-1971).

by Tobin Hansen, PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology
“It’s like being dropped off on the other side of the world... Here, I’m nobody. I’m nothing,” Carlos murmurs, searching for words to describe deportation to Nogales, Sonora, Mexico after living in the United States for thirty years, since age four. We lean against an abandoned cement house on a narrow street for one of many conversations. Carlos’s faded black and red flannel envelops arm and neck tattoos in Old English script: Phoenix street gang, list of years incarcerated, “Forever Blessed.”

by Jeremiah Favara, PhD candidate, School of Journalism and Communication
On December 3, 2015, Secretary of State Ashton B. Carter announced that all combat positions in the U.S. military would be opened to women. Less than two months after the announcement, I received a recruiting flyer in the mail from the Oregon Army National Guard featuring a photo of a woman soldier in camouflage fatigues and touting new opportunities in combat occupations for women. While the opening of all combat positions to women is unprecedented, the publication of recruiting materials featuring images of women soldiers and appeals based on new opportunities for women has been crucial to military recruiting efforts for the last forty years.

by Baran Germen, PhD candidate, Department of Comparative Literature
In 2013, at the height of the Gezi Park protests, several national media outlets reported a shocking case of public harassment in Kabataş, a central neighborhood of Istanbul. The alleged account that approximately a hundred shirtless male protestors attacked a veiled woman with a six-month-old baby was immediately taken up by the then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “They attacked my veiled sister,” said the injured Erdoğan repeatedly in a brotherly alliance with the victim of the so-called Kabataş attack.

by Elizabeth C. Miller, ABD, Department of Sociology
Prior to receiving the CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant I’d spent six months conducting ethnographic fieldwork on two large-scale, industrialized chicken farms. This always led to interesting reactions when people asked what I did for a living. Many people expressed disgust, curiosity, surprise, or they just cut to the chase and asked if I was now a vegan. As a social scientist, I am always looking for patterns in people’s behavior, but I found no correlations between people’s responses to my work and their identities. In fact, people’s responses to my project seemed quite random, except for one group of people: backyard chicken keepers.