Michele Aichele
The Center for the Study of Women in Society is playing an active community role in celebrating Women’s History Month this March by sending UO graduate students and professors into Eugene School District 4J classrooms through its Road Scholars Program. The scholars will speak to the 2010 theme of the National Women’s History Project, “Writing Women Back Into History.”
The first presentations will be held at two elementary schools and one high school, on subjects as varied as women’s roles in agriculture, contributions of women composers, and women’s political activism on the international stage.
A group of fourth and fifth graders at Adams Elementary will get a visit on March 8 from Michele Aichele, a graduate student in the UO Musicology Department. Aichele will play classical works written by women and talk about “Women as Composers: Writing Women Back into Music.” Aichele will also present her talk to two classes of 8th graders at the Arts & Technology Academy at Jefferson on March 16.
Megan Burke
Two classes of first graders at Charlemagne/Fox Hollow will learn about women as farmers and inventors of tools in “Women Are Great, Women are Good, Now We Thank Them for Our Food: Women’s Contributions to Agriculture” when Megan Burke comes to visit on March 16. Burke, a graduate student in the UO Department of Philosophy, will be meeting with children who have opportunities to participate in the Charlemagne school garden.
4J’s International High School sponsors a joint presentation on March 8 at South Eugene High School featuring graduate student Christina Mitchell from Conflict and Dispute Resolution, UO School of Law, and documentary filmmaker Gabriela Martínez, assistant professor in the UO School of Journalism and Communication.
Christina Mitchell
Mitchell completed her undergraduate internship in 2009 in Cape Town, South Africa. She will talk about the anti-apartheid struggle from a feminist perspective in a lecture titled “Clinging to Mandela: Exploring the Gendered Discourse of South African Apartheid Resistance History.”
Gabriela Martínez
Martínez will talk about her research and show her documentary film “Political Economy of Memory: Women and the Oaxaca Uprising,” about a political uprising and media takeover by indigenous women in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006. The takeover created a sense of great unity among people of all walks of life and instilled a sense of having a voice for the people.
“Fact and Fiction: Body Image in the Time of Photoshop” is the name of the slideshow and talk Mickey Stellavato will present to a class of 7th and 8th grade students on March 19 at the Arts & Technology Academy at Jefferson Middle School. Stellavato, who is working toward a Ph.D. in the UO School of Journalism and Communication, will teach ways to deconstruct the images we consume, introduce a critical perspective and train students to live with a wary eye. “Digital manipulations, believed by many to be authentic representations, can distort our sense of self and organic nature,” she says.
To read more about these presentations …
