2010-11

CSWS Events for 2010-2011

Many  CSWS events for 2010-11 are part of “Women’s Rights in a Global World,” the 2010-11 inaugural series of the *Lorwin Lectureship on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. This yearlong series of lectures, symposia, workshops, and other events focuses on the continuing struggles for women’s rights and is intended to inspire new scholarship and activism on women’s rights. It grows out of CSWS’s historical mission: to generate research on women and gender and to disseminate that research to a broader feminist community. The Lorwin Lectureship on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is funded by a gift from Val and Madge Lorwin to the University of Oregon College of Arts and Sciences and School of Law.

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Fall 2010

• October 19, 2010: A Lorwin Event*, EMU Ballroom
  Symposium: Women’s Rights, Microfinance, and Entrepreneurial Solutions to Poverty
  1. Moderator: Ron Severson, Business School, University of Oregon; Maple Microdevelopment
  2. Lamia Karim, Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Oregon
  3. Cricket Keating, Assistant Professor, Department of Women’s Studies, The Ohio State University
  4. Julianne Pacheco, Kiva.org
  5. Antonia Lydia Nalunga, Project Officer, FRIENDS Consult Ltd., Kampala, Uganda

     Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society, Department of International Studies, Clark Honors College, UO Women’s Center, UO International Business and Economics Club, and the Lundquist College of Business.

• October 19, 2010: A Lorwin Event, EMU Ballroom

Women in Microfinance: Workshop Sessions

The University of Oregon Microfinance Initiative (UOMI)  offered four workshops about women in microfinance. Workshops included:

1. Maple Microdevelopment: Working with Female Entrepreneurs in Uganda—Antonia Lydia Nalunga, project officer at FRIENDS Consult Ltd. in Kampala, Uganda, speaks about her experiences in microfinance.
2. Local Women in Microfinance: The Experience of Lane County Organizations
3. Measuring the Outcomes of Microfinance on Women’s Empowerment: Perspectives from East Africa and Latin America
4. A Self-Help Savings and Loan Group Simulation (presented by the University of Oregon Microfinance Initiative)

• October 20, 2010: A Lorwin Event*, 221 McKenzie
  Mass Weddings and Garment Factories: The Reintegration of LTTE Women Fighters in Postwar Sri Lanka — Cricket Keating is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s Studies, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

This paper analyzes the demobilization of the women fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the group that fought for political autonomy for the Tamil people of the north and East of Sri Lanka from 1983-2009. During the war, women militants of the LTTE played a very active and visible role as combatants and discourses and practices of gender liberation became deeply intertwined with discourses and practices of militarism. In May 2009, the Sri Lankan government defeated the LTTE, thus ending the brutal civil war, and many of the former combatants, in particular the women combatants, are currently being reintegrated. This analysis focuses on the linkage of the reintegration process with the discourses and practices of contemporary capitalism and heterosexualism.

Sponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies Jeremiah Speaker Fund and the Center for the Study of Women in Society.

• October 29, 2010: EMU
  Graduate Student Coffee Hour—CSWS’s first ever graduate student coffee hour. This event is an opportunity for us to get to know our grad student community better and for grad students affiliated with CSWS to get to know each other better.

Winter 2011

• January 21, 2011: EMU
  Coffee, Sweets, and Publishing! A Roundtable on Publishing for Feminist Graduate Students
  When CSWS held its first coffee hour for graduate students in November, there was a great deal of enthusiasm for a second coffee hour that would focus specifically on publishing. Michael Hames-Garcia, head of Ethnic Studies, will join CSWS director Carol Stabile in a roundtable discussion about graduate students and publishing.

• February 2, 2011: A Lorwin Event*, EMU Ballroom
  “The Perilous Consequences of Public Policy Decisions: Weathering the Storm of Natural and Man-made Disasters in the Gulf”
  —Dr. Beverly Wright, environmental justice scholar and activist, is the founder of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice currently at Dillard University in New Orleans. The Center addresses environmental and health inequities along the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor and is a community/university partnership providing education, training, and job placement. Since Hurricane Katrina, the Center has focused largely on research, policy, community outreach, assistance, and the education of displaced African-American residents of New Orleans. Dr. Wright served as the co-chair of Sustainable Energy and Environmental Taskforce for New Orleans Mayor-Elect Mitch Landrieu’s transition team.Dr. Wright’s lecture is presented by the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society and cosponsored by the CSWS Women of Color Project, School of Law, Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Department of Anthropology, and the ASUO Women’s Center.

• February 28, 2011: A Lorwin Event*, EMU Fir Room
  Symposium: Women’s Activism, Women’s RightsModerator: Vandana Shiva is the 2011 Wayne Morse Chair of Law and PoliticsSpeakers:
  1. Michele Gamburd, Professor, Anthropology Department, Portland State University, “Sri Lankan Migrant Workers: Obstacles and Challenges to Activism”
  2. Eileen Otis, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, “From Masters to Servers: The Emergence and Struggles of China’s Feminized Service Workforce”
  3. Guadalupe Quinn, Immigrant Rights Advocacy Program Coordinator (Amigos), “Immigrant Women Workers In Oregon”
  4. Abby Solomon, Homecare Coordinator, Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU), “Women Healthcare Workers in Oregon”

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• March 9, 2011: EMU
  CSWS Noon Talk: Lauren Kessler on Marketing Your Book
  Lauren Kessler will talk to faculty and graduate students about marketing both trade and academic books. A professor in the UO School of Journalism and Communication and director of the Literary Nonfiction Program, Kessler is the author of eleven books, including Pacific Northwest Book Award winner Dancing with Rose and Oregon Book Award winner Stubborn Twig—both literary nonfiction. She also wrote The Dissident Press, a history of alternative journalism, and three textbooks. Her most recent book is My Teenage Werewolf (Viking, 2010).

• March 16, 2011
  CSWS Noon Talk: Miriam Abelson on “Southern Gentleman? Transmen and Masculinity in the U.S. South”
  Based on 16 interviews with transgender men and ethnographic observation in the southeastern United States, this presentation focuses on how these men live and often thrive in a place that is usually considered inhospitable to them. It will include a description of some of the local support communities that allow transmen to access needed services and find social support. In addition, it will examine how these men view their masculinity, particularly in relation to common regional images of masculinity, and how these support communities can encourage particular visions of what it means to be a man and how men should act. Miriam Abelson is a GTF, UO Department of Sociology. She received a 2010 CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant for her project.

Spring 2011

See Upcoming Events for more of our Spring 2011 Events schedule.

• April 13, 2011:
  CSWS Noon Talk: Gina Herrmann on “Voices of the Vanquished: Spanish Republican Women in War and Prison.”
  Gina Herrmann, associate professor, Romance Languages, received a 2009 CSWS Faculty Research Grant for her project. Herrmann investigates how experiences of war and imprisonment get translated into individual and collective expressions of political subjectivity. This study is based on an extensive oral history project carried out with some 40 Spanish women who belonged to communist, anarchist, or socialist organizations during the Spanish Civil War 1936-39.

 

• May 11, 2011: A Lorwin Event*, EMU Ballroom
  Lorwin Lecture: “Half the Sky: The Greatest Unexploited Resource in the World Today Isn’t Oil or Gold or Wind. It’s Women.”—Sheryl WuDunn
  Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn presents the inaugural Lorwin Lecture.  Her provocative topic derives from the speaker’s well-read book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which she co-authored with husband and New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. This book relates stories of extraordinary women throughout Africa and Asia who overcome oppression and go on to thrive – a Cambodian girl sold into sex slavery escapes from her brothel and with the assistance of an aid group builds a successful retail business. An Ethiopian woman suffers devastating injuries from childbirth but receives medical assistance, is counseled to return to school, and goes on to become a surgeon. These stories and others show that “the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential.” The stories in Half the Sky demonstrate how people and organizations can and do unleash women’s potential, and encourage the reader to do our part. The book shows through example that throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population.

• May 13, 2011
  Inequality in Academia Symposium
  The Center for the Study of Women in Society’s Social Science Feminist Network Research Interest Group’s (SSFN-RIG) presentation of SSFN-RIG research on time use among faculty in five departments at the University of Oregon. Keynote address by Dr. Dana Britton, Professor of Sociology Kansas State University, outgoing editor of Gender and Society, and co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation Advance Paid grant to study the transition between associate and full professor for faculty (mostly) in the science, engineering, and math disciplines. Panels on the challenges and successes of collaborative research and surviving the academy

 

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