Editor’s Note: During winter and spring terms 2019, Professor Carlos Aguirre served as interim director of CLLAS. We are delighted that he is among those who were awarded a 2019-20 Fund for Faculty Excellence Award.We also would like to congratulate CLLAS affiliated faculty Laura Pulido and Sarah Wald, and other UO colleagues receiving the award.
Fifteen UO faculty members have been selected for the prestigious Fund for Faculty Excellence awards.
Carlos Aguirre
The Fund for Faculty Excellence was established in 2006 with the generous support of Lorry I. Lokey and increases the university’s ability to highlight and encourage world-class research and teaching. Since 2006, more than 160 faculty members have received the awards, recognizing their excellence in creative accomplishment, education, research and scholarships.
“I am thrilled to celebrate our excellent faculty,” said Provost and Senior Vice President Jayanth Banavar. “Their scholarly and research efforts have great impact, and they inspire our students and all of us.”
Candidates are nominated by deans, with suggestions from faculty members and unit heads, and nominations are reviewed by the Fund for Faculty Excellence awards committee before a final determination is made by the provost. The award provides faculty members with a $20,000 salary supplement or $30,000 for research support.
Recipients of the Fund for Faculty Excellence awards for 2019-20 are:
CLLAS recently announced the recipients of its 2019-20 Graduate Student Research Awards, Tinker Grants, Faculty Collaboration Grant, and Latinx Studies Seed Grant. They are as follows:
Graduate Student Research Grants
“Inner Exile in Formation and Sustenance of Racial, Sexual, and Gendered Communities in Chile and Argentina.” Jon Jaramillo, Romance Languages.
“The Politics of Seeking Shelter: Gender-Based Violence and the Right to Safety Among Low-Income Women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” Emily Masucci, Anthropology.
“Complicating Vulnerability: Gendered Disaster Narratives, Ice Loss, & Resilience in the Peruvian Cordillera Blanca.” Holly Moulton, Environmental Studies.
Faculty Collaboration Research Grant
“Oregon’s Water Future: Climate Change, Environmental Disasters, and Community Resilience.” Alai Reyes-Santos, Ethnic Studies, in collaboration with Oregon Environmental Council (OEC).
Second Year Latinx Studies Seed Grant
“Decolonial Environmentalisms: Race, Genre, and Latinx Literature.”David Vazquez, English.
Third Year Tinker Foundation Grants
Tinker Field Research Grants are open to students across all academic disciplines and graduate degree programs to assist master’s and doctoral students with travel and field-related expenses for brief periods of field research in Latin America. Administered by CLLAS, the program is funded by the Tinker Foundation, with matching funds from CLLAS, the UO Office of Academic Affairs, and the Graduate School.
“Recalling Runaways: Studies of Slavery and Absenteeism in Cuba.” Aziza Baker, History.
May 8, 2019—The Dreamers Working Group (DWG) includes staff, faculty, graduate students, and community members committed to creating a community of welcome and support for undocumented and Dreamer students, students with DACA, and students in mixed-status families.
One way the DWG builds this support and community is through education and training outreach on the UO campus. Working in collaboration with CLLAS, UO professor Ellen McWhirter (counseling psychology) developed an hour-long info-session to build understanding of the realities faced by students with precarious status. DWG volunteers have led approximately 40 info-sessions since winter 2017, offering these educational opportunity units all over campus and beyond. Julie Weise, associate professor of history, created the Dreamers Ally Training initiative in fall 2017. Since then the DWG has held six robust, four-hour training sessions, training almost 400 staff, faculty, and graduate employees as allies.
As director of Multicultural and Identity-based Support Services and chair of the DWG, Justine Carpenter focuses on direct student support and access and prioritizes student-facing work. The successful Duck Funder campaign—and other fundraising activities that created a scholarship for undocumented & Dreamer students—has been at the center of this work. Nine students received scholarships for spring 2019 and six to nine scholarships will be awarded for AY 2019-2020. The UO Dreamers webpage has also been reoriented toward student access and includes useful information on financial aid, scholarships, wellness, and student support and resources.
The DWG is ready to build upon the foundation of volunteerism, ally membership, and administrative support to institutionalize strides taken in education, training and outreach for campus partners and access and advocacy for student success. New initiatives include: 1) community outreach to bridge the divide between campus and the Eugene-Springfield community; and 2) development of more effective legal support for undocumented and Dreamer students, students with DACA, and students from mixed-status families. The DWG has made progress toward the first goal of community outreach with a committee dedicated to connecting more effectively with community leaders and Eugene/Springfield school districts and libraries, and welcoming community members to campus more effectively with projects like creating a Spanish-language map of the UO, planning a community reception, and sharing the Latino Roots exhibit.
The DWG needs the help of allies and experts in pursuit of the second goal of developing more effective legal support for our students, however. Please email feather@uoregon.edu to volunteer.
— Feather Crawford, the CLLAS event & program coordinator, also works as a part-time coordinator for the Dreamers Working Group.
CLLAS offers both Faculty Collaborative Research Grants and the Faculty Latinx Studies Seed Grant. Application deadline for faculty grants is: 12:00 p.m. (noon), Friday, April 5, 2019.
The Oregon Center for Translation Studies will be hosting its first symposium, Feb. 21-22, 2019. The event will include a distinguished keynote speaker and roundtable panels addressing some of the key issues in translation. A more detailed schedule will be forthcoming, but please mark your calendars and plan to join us for an opening panel on Thurs. Feb. 21, 3:30-5:30 (110 Fenton). Additional panels and keynote address in the Browsing Room, Knight Library, Friday Feb. 22, 10:00-6:00.
Amalia Gladhart, Professor of Spanish Director, Oregon Center for Translation Studies
Around the O / December 12, 2018 — To date, more than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. As Gabriela Pérez Báez explains, languages hold critical knowledge about the history of survival of the communities of speakers, their ecological perspectives and their well-being.
Gabriela Pérez Báez
Pérez Báez is an assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s linguistics department and serves as the director of its new Language Revitalization Lab. She also serves as co-director for the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages and works with the UO’s Northwest Indian Language Institute, known as NILI.
Of the more than 300 languages spoken at the time of contact with Europeans in what is now the United States, more than half stopped being spoken as a result of colonization and state-building policies. These languages are considered to be dormant or sleeping. Many more are highly endangered today.
“The language communities recognize how critical the languages are and as a result have engaged in the arduous work of researching the languages in historical archives in order to reconstruct them and bring them back to use,” Pérez Báez said.
The Northwest Indian Language Institute provides training to Native American teachers working to revitalize many of these languages. Institute staff also partner with tribes to carry out on-site trainings and develop curriculum to teach highly endangered or sleeping languages in the classroom.
The institute’s efforts are being recognized with the announcement earlier in the fall that the National Breath of Life, of which the institute is a partner, has received support through a $311,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant was awarded to Daryl Baldwin, director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University, and Pérez Báez.
Since 2011, the National Breath of Life has provided training on the use of archival documentation for the revitalization of highly endangered and dormant languages to 117 community researchers from 55 language communities. With this growth comes the need for software to support the advancement of the research.
In response, the upcoming NEH-funded National Breath of Life 2.0 workshops are designed to provide participants with training in the use of the new indigenous languages digital archive. The archival system is the only available software that allows for the organization, storage and retrieval of digital copies of linguistic archival materials.
It directly links independent data derived from linguistic analysis to original manuscript pages. Pérez Báez said its powerful search function allows for the in-depth linguistic analysis required for the reconstruction of highly endangered or dormant languages.
The indigenous languages digital archive is modeled after the Miami-Illinois digital archive, also funded by a prior NEH grant and designed by the Myaamia Center to advance research for the revitalization of the heritage language of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.
Pérez Báez said the grant will support the refinement of indigenous languages digital archive. It will also provide funding to hold two training workshops for community researchers engaged in language revitalization to learn how to use the archival system. The community researchers will then have access to the software free of charge.
The grant “has had significant positive impact on our ability to utilize archival materials for our revitalization effort,” Baldwin said. “It is an important step in the development of National Breath of Life to be able to share this technology with other tribal communities.”
A National Breath of Life 2.0 workshop will be held at Miami University in July 2019. Applications to the 2019 workshop are being accepted at www.nationalbreathoflife.org. The deadline is Saturday, Dec. 15.
The UO institute will hold a second workshop in Eugene in 2020.
“NILI is excited to be partnering with the National Breath of Life in this important national workshop, and we look forward to hosting community language leaders from across the nation,” said Janne Underriner, director of the institute.
Access the above link for giving to the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies Gift Fund. Online gifts may be made using the form available at this link; all gifts are processed by the University of Oregon Foundation, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization responsible for receiving and administering private donations to the University of Oregon.
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