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

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. 

by Celeste Reeb, Doctoral Candidate, Department of English

[gentle harpsichord jingle] [music reminiscent of the Jaws theme playing] [exotic percussive music]

V Varun Chaudhry worked as a CSWS pro tem research assistant during AY 2018-19 while completing his dissertation through the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University.  He is now an instructor in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Brandeis University. V’s research focuses on the institutionalization of “transgender” in nonprofit and funding agencies through ethnographic research in Philadelphia, PA.

In late May, CSWS concluded its three-year focus on “Women and Work” by joining with the recently renamed Department of Indigenous, Race, & Ethnic Studies in a celebration of the publication of a book that had its origins in Hendricks hallowed hallways. Shireen Roshanravan was doing post-doctorate work in the Women and Gender Studies Program at UO during 2009-10 with the mentorship of Lynn Fujiwara—now an associate professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, & Ethnic Studies at UO—when they began a collaborative relationship in their shared focus on Women of Color feminisms.

I started as director of CSWS in the summer of 2016. Sadly for us, CSWS lost two of our founding mothers within months of each other in 2016. Joan Acker and Sandi Morgen, pathbreaking feminist titans, made the Center a focus of research and activism around women’s economic rights and security for over forty years.

Introduction by CSWS Director and Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law Michelle McKinley, School of Law

Interview by Ulrick Casimir, Career Instructor, Department of English 

by Jenée Wilde, Dissemination Specialist, CSWS , Senior Instructor, Department of English

Thomas Beaumont (Class of ’69) first met Professor Joan Acker as an undergraduate sociology and social welfare student at University of Oregon.  

by Sangita Gopal, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema Studies

The Women of Color (WOC) Project has been a special project under the auspices of CSWS since 2005. The program is comprised of tenure-track women faculty, and our collective has approximately 50 participants, of whom about 30 are active constituents. We represent all the colleges and schools within the UO.