The Department of Geography is excited to announce the 14th Annual Critical Geographies Mini-Conference.
The themes for this year’s conference are
Critical Race/Subaltern Geographies,
Digital Geographies,
Critical Physical Geographies, and
The intersections between these themes.
Keynote speakers include UO Professor of Geography and Ethnic Studies Laura Pulido; Emma Slager, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies, University of Washington-Tacoma; and Nathan McClintock, Associate Professor of Urban Planning, Portland State University.
This event is free and open to the public.
Presented by Ranjani Mazumdar, Professor of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharial Nehru University
Helena Maria Viramontes, author of the UO's 2019-2020 Common Reading book selection Under the Feet of Jesus, will speak to the campus community about her work as an author and activist. Topics of the book that may be addressed include farm labor, migrant labor, environmental racism, Chicana feminisms, or migrant healthcare systems. Viramontes' talk will include readings from Their Dogs Came With Them and Under the Feet of Jesus.
Featuring Dr. Lucy Jones (Caltech).
Dr. Lucy Jones is the founder of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society, with a mission to foster the understanding and application of scientific information in the creation of more resilient communities. She is also a research associate at the Seismological Laboratory of Caltech. In 2016, she completed 33 years of federal service with the US Geological Survey. Most recently, she led the creation of a national science strategy for all the natural hazards studied by the USGS to promote the science that would better prepare the nation for future natural hazards. In her recent book The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them), Dr. Jones offers both a look at how natural disasters have affected the course of history and how we can prepare for them.
Sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, UO Portland, and the School of Architecture & Environment.
Helena María Viramontes will talk about how her fiction writing is the way she practices activism for social justice. Join Helena Maria Viramontes, author of the UO's 2019-2020 Common Reading book selection Under the Feet of Jesus, in conversation with local organizations and activists concerned with issues such as farm labor, migrant labor, environmental racism, Chicana feminisms, and access to quality healthcare, food, and transportation.
Gay rodeo reveals a long-marginalized segment of the western community, blending rural heritage with the courage, humor, and expression of urban gay America. Join folklorist Craig Miller on a journey into the history of gay rodeo, and explore the values that help unify it as a community.
Miller's talk is cosponsored by the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Oregon Department of History, the Folklore and Public Culture Program, and LGBT Education and Support Services. Included with regular admission; free for members and UO ID card holders. Show your Oregon Trail or other EBT card for an admission discount.
Kathakali is a classical Indian dance drama from southwestern Kerala state. Known for its vibrant make-up and costuming, highly emotive acting style, and large, imposing movements, this visually impressive art form narrates stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics. The art has been widely celebrated both inside and outside of India, and its acting techniques have been incorporated into modern theater training all over the world. Come experience the world of Kathakali!
Lorwin Lectureship on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Rhaisa Kameela Williams is assistant professor of Theater and Performance Studies in the Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research uses mixed-archive methods—spanning across literature, family history, archives, and public policy—to focus on the intersections of blackness, motherhood, affect, and disquieting modes of freedom. Her book-in-progress, Mama, Don’t You Weep: Motherhood, Blackness, and Performances of Grief, traces the intimate relationship between grief and black motherhood from the civil rights movement to the present. Offering discontinuous readings of grief, the book asserts that black women, no matter their personal relationship to offspring or othermothering, have specifically mobilized grief inherent to black motherhood as a tactic to perform, remake, and critique forms of citizenship.
This event features three short performances (musical, theatrical, and poetic) followed by a roundtable discussion on the role of artists and art in addressing the climate emergency and building individual and collective resilience.
Roundtable participants:
Wayne Morse Chair and viola da gamba player Dr. Lucy Jones
painter Naeemeh Naeemaei
Theresa May (UO Theater Arts)
Emily Scott (UO History of Art and Architecture and Environmental Studies)
John Witte (UO English)
Part of the Wayne Morse Center’s 2019-21 inquiry into Science, Policy and the Public.
Free and open to the public
A sci-fi omnibus feature film composed of seven standalone short stories where supernatural trans and queer people from various cultures use their powers to protect, love, teach, fight and thrive. Followed by a Q&A session with actor, D'Lo and cinematographer, Aja Pop, of Transfinite.
Speaker: Dr. Don Daniels, University of Oregon.
Bio: Assistant Professor Daniels conducted his first field trip to Papua New Guinea in 2006 and has been conducting research on Papuan languages ever since. His research focuses on morphosyntactic theory and description, language change, and linguistic reconstruction. He completed his PhD in linguistics at UC Santa Barbara in 2015, spent three years as a postdoc at the Australian National University, and joined the UO linguistics faculty last year.
Presented by the Association of Anthropology Graduate Students.
Stephanie Land’s bestselling debut memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive recounts her harrowing saga as a single mom navigating the poverty trap. Her unflinching and inspiring testimony exposes the physical, economic, and social brutality that domestic workers face, all while radiating a parent’s hope and resilience.
At age 28, Land’s dream of attending college and becoming a writer are deferred when a summer fling turns into an unplanned pregnancy. After facing domestic abuse, and lacking any form of reliable safety net, she checks into a homeless shelter with her 7-month-old daughter. She begins the bureaucratic nightmare of applying for food stamps and subsidized housing, and starts cleaning houses for $9/hour. Mired in patronizing government processes and paltry wages, Land illustrates the trauma of grasping for stability from a rigged system, and demonstrates how hard work doesn’t always pay off.
After years of barely scraping by, Land graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Montana in 2014, and started a career as a freelance writer. She writes about economic and social justice, domestic abuse, chronic illness, and motherhood, and has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox, Salon, and many other outlets. She’s worked with Barbara Ehrenreich at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and is a writing fellow at the Center for Community Change.
Sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center’s Margaret Hallock Program for Women’s Rights. Cosponsored by the UO Division of Equity and Inclusion, Center for the Study of Women in Society, Department of Sociology, and Labor Education and Research Center.
Humanities scholars, universities, and centers across the West are increasingly thinking about ways to leverage institutional strengths and resources for the benefit of the public good, what many are now calling the “Public Humanities.” Centered around three thematic axes—climate change, sovereignty, and place—this conference explores the challenges and opportunities of such work as it relates to partnering and collaborating with the First Peoples and Nations of the lands our institutions occupy. Responding to the calls of scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith to decolonize methodologies, archives, and institutions; to center Indigenous knowledge, culture, and voices in contemporary work; and to improve relationships with and responsibilities to tribal communities, this conference explores how institutions might productively engage tribal communities based upon core principles of respect, reciprocity, consultation, stewardship, and service.
Assistant Professor of Italian Diana Garvin will present a lecture titled "Farming under Fascism: The Ecology of Italian Empire"
Abstract:
Biopolitical control of Italy’s East African colonies has traditionally been understood as state-sanctioned violence enacted on human bodies. By contrast, this talk takes an ecocritical approach to imperialism to investigate how Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime attempted to enhance the nutritional content of Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Somali plants and animals through rationalist agronomy. Regular grids promised to organize wild coffee tree groves. State-sanctioned calendars set the dates for animal husbandry. Enumerated lessons even guided colonists and indigenous farmers through rationalist apiculture, as though bees could march along an assembly line to make honey at Mussolini’s command.
The Thirteenth Annual Rennard Strickland Lecture, with special guest lecturer Mary Kathryn Nagle, will be held on Tuesday November 12, 2019 at the Knight Law School with a reception at the Many Nations Longhouse to follow. Mary Kathryn Nagle is a playwright and a partner at Pipestem Law, a firm specializing in tribal sovereignty of Native nations and peoples. Her talk is titled “Tribal Sovereignty: the True Origins of Environmental Law.”
George and Matilda Fowler Lecture
Angela Washko: “Poking the Hive: Interventions in Unusual Media Environments”
Artist and activist Angela Washko will present several different strategies for performing, participating in and transforming online environments that are especially hostile toward women. She will introduce her long-term performative intervention “The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft” alongside several interventions, interviews, performances, written works and video games works she has created about the manosphere and online men’s seduction communities. She will additionally introduce her newest project Workhorse Queen, a documentary film about drag queen and former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Mrs. Kasha Davis and her life and career post-reality-television.
Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it. Since 2012, Washko has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an ongoing intervention inside the most popular online role-playing game of all time. Washko's most recent project, The Game: The Game,is a video game in which professional pick-up artists attempt to seduce the player using their coercive and often dangerous signature techniques sourced from their instructional books and video materials.A recent recipient of the Impact Award at Indiecade, a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, and a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant, Washko's practice has been highlighted in The New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The New York Times and more. Her projects have been presented internationally at venues including Museum of the Moving Image, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Angela Washko is an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
This lecture is made possible by the George and Matilda Fowler Endowment Fund.
Speaker: Dr. Amy Boddy, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Bio: Amy M. Boddy is a human biologist and evolutionary theorist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work uses applications from evolution and ecology to understand human health and disease. She uses a combination of genomics, computational biology and evolutionary theory to understand life history trade-offs between survival and reproduction across different levels of biological organization. One component of her research program examines how environmental cues, such as high extrinsic mortality, may guide resource allocations to cancer defenses and reproduction. Current cancer research topics include comparative oncology, intragenomic conflict, cellular life history trade-offs, and early life adversity and cancer outcomes later in life. In addition to her cancer research, she studies maternal/fetal conflict theory and the consequences of fetal microchimeric cells in maternal health and disease.
Presented by the Association of Anthropology Graduate Students.
Featuring Jason DeParle, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.
His new book, A Good Provider is One Who Leaves, tells the story of an unforgettable family as they endure years of sacrifice and separation, willing themselves out of shantytown poverty into a new global middle class. Migration is changing the world–reordering politics, economics, and cultures across the globe. With nearly 45 million immigrants in the United States, few issues are as polarizing. But if the politics of immigration is broken, immigration itself—tens of millions of people gathered from every corner of the globe—remains an underappreciated American success.
Jason DeParle is a senior writer at The New York Times and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine. Previously he served as a domestic correspondent in Washington for The Times. Prior to joining The Times, Mr. DeParle was an editor at The Washington Monthly since 1987.
A Democratic Governance Speaker Series event, sponsored by the Wayne Morse Center and the UO School of Journalism and Communication.
Come learn about a three-week, summer study abroad course in Bolivia where you will live in autonomous indigenous territories and learn from locals and UO Professor Derrick Hindery. The course is focused on service learning, community, and the interaction between indigenous rights and environmental protection.
Programs Dates:
Mid-June to July 2020
Applications Deadlines:
Priority - February 15 receive $100 program discount
Final - March 15
Find out more or APPLY TODAY!
https://geo.uoregon.edu/programs/bolivia/indigenous-rights-and-environmental-justice-in-bolivia
This five-week study abroad program in the islands of the Palauan archipelago will include working with locals, students, and staff from Palau to excavate and analyze archaeological remains that date back to some of the earliest stages of prehistoric settlement in Micronesia ca. 3000 years ago.
Program Dates:
July 25 - August 29, 2020
Applications Deadlines:
Priority - February 15 (receive $100 program discount)
Final - March 15
Find out more or APPLY TODAY!
https://geo.uoregon.edu/programs/palau/archaeology-in-palau
Join the BE Series, the Native American Student Union, Native American Studies, the Many Nations Longhouse, and the Sapsik’wala Teacher Education Program for a conversation with Joey Montoya. As a Lipan Apache multimedia artist, clothing designer, and entrepreneur, Joey’s work is aimed at increasing the visibility and resiliency of Indigenous peoples so they may create and fuel position social change.
Dinner will be served at 5:30 p.m. followed by a public talk and Q&A. It is free and open to the public.
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University where I study the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine, race and citizenship, knowledge and power. I am also the founder of the JUST DATA Lab, and a Faculty Associate in the Center for Information Technology Policy, Program on History of Science, Center for Health and Wellbeing, Program on Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Department of Sociology. I serve on the Executive Committees for the Program in Global Health and Health Policy and Center for Digital Humanities.
My first book, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), investigates the social dimensions of stem cell science with a particular focus on the passage and implementation of a “right to research” codified in California. My second book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity 2019) examines the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, analyzing specific cases of “discriminatory design” and offering tools for a socially-conscious approach to tech development. I also edited a volume titled Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press 2019), which brings together an incredible set of scholars to explore the interplay between innovation and containment across a wide array of social arenas, past and present. Finally, my next book project is tentatively titled The Emperor’s New Genes: Borders, Belonging, and Bioethics Beyond the Genome. It is a multi-sited investigation of how human population genomics reflects, reinforces, and sometimes challenges sociopolitical distinctions such as race, caste, and citizenship, focusing on initiatives in the US, South Africa, and India.
Taken together, this body of work addresses debates about how science and technology shape the social world and how people can, should, and do engage technoscience, grappling all the while with the fact that what may bring health and longevity to some may threaten the dignity and rights of others.
Join us for a 30-minute presentation by author Kirby Brown (Associate Professor, Department of English) about his book, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Century Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970, followed by Q&A, a book signing, and light refreshments.
The publication of a book is a major achievement for authors and universities, representing significant investments of research, creativity, time, and resources. UO Authors, Book Talks is a pilot series that will celebrate books published by UO faculty authors. The two-part series will occur during the 2019-2020 academic year, with one event featuring one author in fall and winter.
Elizabeth Rush is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore and Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Gaurdian, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard and the New Republic, among others. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants including the Howard Foundation Fellowship, awarded by Brown University; the Society for Environmental Journalism Grant; the Metcalf Institute Climate Change Adaptation Fellowship; and the Science in Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University, and teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.