CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant

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 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.

By Olivia G. Wing, PhD Candidate, Department of History
In the late 1930s, Portland’s Chinese Girl Reserves and Japanese Girl Reserves each hosted a variety of fund-raising events to support causes of their choosing. Fundraisers were not unusual for a service organization sponsored by the YWCA. In the late 1930s, however, the Chinese and Japanese Girl Reserves each chose to sponsor seemingly diverging causes: war relief for Chinese refugees and summer camp, respectively.

by Ruby Amanda Oboro-Offerie, PhD Student, Department of Sociology
Public trust in institutions has long been a focus of social science research, yet most studies have concentrated on political institutions (Van Der Meer 2010), banks (Fungáčová et al. 2019), and regional (Ron and Crow 2015) and international organizations (Torgler 2008; Hessami 2011). In contrast, limited attention has been paid to trust in women’s organizations (e.g., women’s rights/empowerment groups or feminist movements), despite their growing role in civil society, global gender advocacy, and transforming social norms and gender power relations (Hassim 2006).

by Yuan Fang, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology
One summer break back home in China, I visited the Henan Museum and found myself drawn to a bronze mirror on display. I had seen many before, but something about this one stopped me. Its delicate designs were beautiful, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant. I pictured a Tang dynasty court lady using it for daily grooming—the familiar image often used to represent bronze mirrors as feminine tools tied to beauty.

by Tali Bitton, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy
For many colonized women, gender-based violence (GBV) is never solely about their being women. When considering GBV within Palestine and Israel, like other forms of political violence, GBV functions as a mechanism of male supremacy within and across both peoples as much as a mechanism of settler colonization. But whereas Israel has a long history of documented GBV against Palestinians (as the UN has found occurred systematically in Israel’s current genocidal campaign in Gaza), the view of GBV within Israel is often presented in inverted form.