Jane Grant Fellowship

Jennifer Erickson

Social Citizenship in a Neoliberal Era

by Jennifer Erickson, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology
Scholars show that welfare policies affect women and men differently due to gender-based relationships with the state, which involve, for example, expectations about child rearing and shifting expectations regarding paid labor. Welfare policies negatively affect many refugee and immigrant groups in the United States by pushing them into the lowest paid sector of the economy. As a cultural project, neoliberal agendas have broadly succeeded in shaping public opinion toward an increased reliance on individual merit, consumerism, volunteerism, and distrust of government.
With GPS unit in hand, Ingrid L. Nelson sets out on her bicycle to survey farmer’s fields for the day.

Fighting for Forests: Gendered Conflicts in Mozambique’s Forest Landscapes

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.
Baran Germen

Melodramatics of Turkish Modernity: Narratives of Victimhood, Affect, and Politics

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.
Malvya Chintakindi (center) interviews three of her participants on a recent trip to Hyderabad, India / photo provided by Chintakindi.

Dreams Deferred: Navigating Aspiration and Constraint in Urban India’s Margins

by Malvya Chintakindi, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology

At age 33, Renuka’s face carried the weathering of a life spent crossing multiple thresholds—between others’ homes and her own, between caste boundaries that marked her as both essential and polluting, between dreams of education and the harsh reality of survival.

Image provided by Rhiannon Lindgren.

The Necessity of Oppositional Care for Transnational Feminist Politics

by Rhiannon Lindgren, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy
When one defines an activity as a “labor of love,” we are often referring to an experience that combines feelings of joy, difficulty, fatigue, and gratitude. While the labor of love is a sacrifice, the prepositional qualifier of “love” indicates the motivation for such a sacrifice. One labors out of a sense of love that is both inspiration and reward for a tiresome endeavor.
Maggie Evans

Strategies of Silence in American Women’s Poetry

by Maggie Evans, PhD candidate, Department of English

The final lines of Marge Piercy’s “The Woman in the Ordinary” exemplify a familiar strain of contemporary American women’s poetry:

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,

a yam of a woman of butter and brass,

compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,

like a handgrenade set to explode,

like goldenrod ready to bloom. 

Maggie Evans

Is Feminist Poetry a Thing of the Past?

by Maggie Evans, PhD graduate, , UO Department of English

Tasked with composing a short riff on the future of feminist research in American poetics, I set out, naturally, for the library, determined to explore a few beginning questions that sprang to mind. Among them: How do contemporary women poets enact or represent feminism(s) in their poetry? How have the changing political and social goals of feminism affected the thematic and formal choices of feminist writers? How do feminist writers depict or imagine the future? Library, here I come!

Jenée Wilde

The BiSciFi Project: Researching Speculative Fictions and Bisexual Lives

by Jenée Wilde, PhD candidate, UO Department of English (Folklore)

As a PhD candidate, my research has resulted in part from frustrations I have felt with the lack of serious treatment given to bisexuality as a position from which to theorize sexual knowledge within humanistic scholarship. While studies of gay, lesbian, and transgender communities and cultural production have dramatically increased over the past two decades, research on bisexuality remains highly undervalued in much of the humanities and social sciences.

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