Visiting Scholars

2020-21 resident fellow: Laura E. Strait is a recent PhD in Media Studies at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication. Her education includes a BA in Cultural Studies (Columbia College Chicago), and an MS in Media Studies (Univ. of Oregon). Her research interests broadly include technology and gaming, social movements in the digital age, and race and gender issues on social media. Her dissertation traces the genealogy of pro-life feminism, its contemporary relationship to liberal feminism, and the varied forms of technologies employed by both groups to build and reinforce issue communities. Laura was the CSWS Jane Grant Dissertation Fellow in 2018, and remains affiliated with the Center and the University of Oregon. Her relevant publications include “Out on Proudmoore: Climate Change on an MMO,” Queerness in Play, Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2018, 261-272; and a book review, “Using Media for Social Innovation,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Podkalicka and Rennie, April, 2019.

2018-19 pro-tem research assistant: V Varun Chaudhry is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. His work focuses on the institutionalization of “transgender” in nonprofit and funding agencies through ethnographic research in Philadelphia, PA. V’s research has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, The Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Sexualities Project at Northwestern, and the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. His writing appears or is forthcoming in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, American Anthropologist, and Critical Inquiry. See also: "When it comes to gender identity, inclusion is more than using the right pronoun"

2015-17 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow in residence: Dr. Joan Haran will be tracking attempts to adapt Starhawk’s novel The Fifth Sacred Thing as a transmedia phenomenon. First published in 1993 and optioned for a cable TV series or feature film, The Fifth Sacred Thing involves a clash between the best and the worst of our possible futures. The stated goal of The Fifth Sacred Thing production team is “to help nurture and support the movements that are already growing to put our world on a path of peace, justice, and ecological harmony,” says Dr. Haran. She used this case study to develop and test the concept of “imaginactivism” as a way of thinking through the cross-fertilization of fictional or artistic cultural productions with social and political activism. Dr. Haran was a Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) in Delmenhorst, Germany, where she was affiliated with the Fiction Meets Science program. While at the HWK she worked on her monograph, Genomic Fictions: Genes, Gender and Genre. This project is a successor to her coauthored monograph Human Cloning in the Media: From Science Fiction to Science Practice (Routledge 2008), which was written while she was a Research Fellow in the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) at Cardiff University. She is also working with Dr. Ildney Cavalcanti of the Federal University of Alagoas, Maceio, Brazil, on compiling and editing a Portuguese and English bilingual anthology of utopian and science fiction dealing with gender and science, with accompanying critical essays. Her research interests include feminist theory; gender, technoscience and representation; and critical and everyday utopias.

Senior Courtesy Research Associate: Cheris Kramarae is a former professor, and director of women’s studies, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.