Center for the Study of Women in Society

Feminist Thought and Scholarship
Research Interest Groups. Research Interest Groups (RIG) organized by CSWS foster collaboration between scholars at the university. Faculty, graduate students, and community members participate in programs and events. RIGs are designed to facilitate collaborative research; create support groups for the preparation of grant proposals; build better connections between scholars and community activists; and generate opportunities for cross-disciplinary dialogue among scholars.

Women of Color Project
CSWS was awarded a Ford Foundation grant in March 2008 from the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW). “Diversifying the Leadership of Women’s Research Centers,” was meant to promote the leadership of women of color from historically underrepresented groups in the United States within NCRW and within its women’s research, policy, and advocacy member centers. CSWS and the UO Office of the Vice President for Research provided matching funds.

Charise Cheney, associate professor, UO Department of Ethnic Studies, is the 2011-12 coordinator of the CSWS Women of Color Project. Cheney’s research interests include African-American popular and political cultures, black nationalist ideologies and practices, and gender and sexuality. She is the author of Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2005) and is currently working on a book about black resistance to school desegregation in Topeka, Kansas in the decade before Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. She earned her PhD at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

Food in the Field—a new CSWS Research Interest Group
“Food in the Field” is a new CSWS interdisciplinary research interest group (RIG) that investigates ideas in the field of food studies, the operations of cultural fields related to food consumption, and the gendered labor that takes place in the farm fields of food production. RIG coordinator Jennifer Burns Levin, an instructor of literature in the UO Clark Honors College, says: “We welcome faculty and graduate students working in social science and humanities fields, and encourage cross-pollination between the two.” For a full listing of 2011-12 events …

Building on the success of the interdisciplinary Food Justice Conference in 2011 and ongoing sustainability initiatives at University of Oregon, FITF in 2011-12 seeks to:

• Create an active, interdisciplinary presence that encourages humanistic research in food studies at University of Oregon
• Foster community among food studies scholars in the humanities and social sciences
• Host faculty and advanced graduate students Works-In-Progress talks to encourage new work (1 per month)
• Welcome eminent visiting food scholars hosted by university departments as a centralized venue to augment public lectures with small-group discussions or workshops
• Initiate speaking engagements with a small number of visiting food studies scholars, if funding and staffing allows
• Serve as a liaison to community food and sustainability groups
• Explore future possibilities for local or regional conferences and related activities.

For more information, contact Jennifer Burns Levin, UO Honors College (Literature), jlevin@uoregon.edu

2011 CSWS Annual Review

Available online at <http://csws.uoregon.edu/?p=6338>, this 24-page publication includes these highlights:

• “Capitalism, Politics, and Gender: A Suicide in Shanghai”—Bryna Goodman, director of Asian Studies and executive director of the UO Confucius Institute for Global China Studies, writes about a legal drama at the center of her CSWS-supported book project.
• “Studying Bollywood: An Interview with Sangita Gopal”—Globalization, isolation, couples, and changing gender roles.
• “Heavenly Bodies: Tablighi Jama’at and the Regulation of Women in Bangladesh”—UO anthropology professor and associate director of CSWS Lamia Karim writes about her research among a group of women who belong to a pietist movement.
• “Pakistan: Gathering Stories of Women in the Valley of SWAT”—UO professor Anita Weiss, head of the Department of International Studies, relates her story-gathering among women in this isolated valley regarding what they endured during the past decade at the hands of the Pakistan Taliban and subsequent invasion by the Pakistan military.

CSWS Research Matters is published three times yearly. Each two-page article is written by a UO faculty member whose research has been supported by CSWS. Available online at <http://csws.uoregon.edu/?page_id=85>,the most recent issues include:

• 2011, Spring: Reproductive Justice on the Ballot by Daniel HoSang, assistant professor, Ethnic Studies and Political Science
• 2011, Winter: Salmon, Women, and Rivers: Community-Based Performance Research by Theresa J. May, assistant professor, Theatre Arts 

Women’s Rights in a Global World Blog

This blog grew out of the 2010-11 Lorwin Lecture series on Civil Rights & Civil LIberties. The blog brings together scholars, students, and activists to discuss issues, events, and ideas related to women’s rights in a global world.

Economic and Social Status of Women

The Status of Women in Oregon: Politics, Economics, Health, Demographics (1998). This report uses national data sets to examine five aspects of women's status: political participation, employment and earnings, economic autonomy, reproductive rights, and health.

Family

Valuing Families: The State of Oregon's Families, Leslie Harris (1999), focuses on families and family life, and contains charts, graphs, and text that illustrate the struggles and successes of families in meeting their day-to-day needs. Topics include: availability of affordable, accessible health care and child care; the impact of taxation on household income; affordability of housing; childhood poverty; use of cash assistance, food stamps, and other services; domestic violence rates; and shelter availability. The series is a new collection of papers dedicated to social policy issues in Oregon.

Feminist Thought and Scholarship:

Sandra Morgen; Joan Acker; Jill Weigt. 2010.Stretched Thin: Poor Families, Welfare Work, and Welfare Reform. Cornell University Press.

Pascoe, Peggy. 2009. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford.

Reis, Elizabeth. 2009. Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lynn Fujiwara. 2008. Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform. University of Minnesota Press.

Microfinance

Lamia Karim, 2011. Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh. University of Minnesota Press. Lamia Karim is the associate director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society and an associate professor in the University of Oregon Department of Anthropology.

Grants and Fellowships

The Center for the Study of Women in Society maintains a number of grant programs to support the work initiated by University of Oregon faculty, staff (with the appropriate end degrees), and graduate students. By providing these highly competitive grants and fellowships, CSWS consistently has supported many important research projects at various stages of development and enriched programs in all sectors of the university. The Center has offered research funding to faculty and graduate students at the University of Oregon for more than 25 consecutive years.

For more details visit: 

http://csws.uoregon.edu/?page_id=16