Dear Friends,

The year in review feature is generally an easy column for the Director to write. As the title suggests, I look back with a sense of pride and satisfaction at a year of successful events, celebrate our guest speakers who sparked insightful conversations, and chronicle our community-building activities that strengthened our bonds as feminist scholars on campus. This year suspends all expectations. I even tried to find a "natural" point of pause to begin this retrospective. There simply wasn't an end to the daily onslaught of misery in these times.

CSWS events have always served as informal sites for networking, support, and mentorship among women faculty and graduate students across campus. When the pandemic shut down our regular programming last year, the Women of Color (WOC) Project filled this need with a virtual books-in-print event series celebrating recent monographs by WOC faculty affiliates.  

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

With a background in comparative media studies and postcolonial theory, Associate Professor Sangita Gopal came to the University of Oregon in 2004 to teach cinema studies in the Department of English. Over time she saw the popular program grow from an English concentration into a unique tri-school major, then into its own department housed in the College of Arts and Sciences.  

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

Anthropology professor Gyoung-Ah Lee has stepped up to lead the Women of Color (WOC) Project at CSWS—a role formerly held by Interim Director Sangita Gopal, associate professor of cinema studies. 

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

Last year, in the early stages of pandemic lockdown, then-CSWS director and law professor Michelle McKinley began receiving panicked emails from faculty friends and Center affiliates who are caregivers. With 4J schools and childcare facilities shut down, as well as shortages in long-term elder care services, how were they supposed to fulfill their teaching and research commitments at the university while also meeting the labor-intensive care needs of others?  

Dear
 Friends, 

By Jenée Wilde, Senior Instructor, Department of English

Baran Germen is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Colorado College. In 2018, he graduated with a PhD in comparative literature from University of Oregon, where he also completed a certificate degree in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and specialized in film studies. His research and teaching focus on global cinema and comparative media studies, cutting across melodrama, queer theory, and Islam and secularism. 

by Jenée Wilde, Senior Instructor, Department of English

“One of the things that became clear during the pandemic is that graduate students were the most affected by lockdowns, but the institution made the least room for addressing how they were affected,” says CSWS Director Sangita Gopal. “Faculty could take a break from research, but graduate students didn’t have that leisure.”

This spring, CSWS resumed the Acker–Morgen Memorial Lecture series after winter weather and pandemic conditions had thwarted the event for the last three years. On May 20, we were thrilled to welcome on campus Dr. Raka Ray, a professor of sociology and South and Southeast Asia studies and dean of social sciences at UC Berkeley. She specializes in gender and feminist theory, domination and inequality, the emerging middle classes, and social movements. Below, political science graduate student Olivia Atkinson offers a personal reflection on Ray’s talk:  

by Sangita Gopal, CSWS Director