Documenting Dignity: Farmworker Testimony & Collaborative Research

Erb Memorial Union
Walnut Room
1222E. 13th Ave.

CLLAS Faculty / Collaborative Research Grantee Presentation

with Phil Scher, associate professor, UO Department of Anthropology, and James Daria, graduate student

Oregon’s farmworkers are subject to powerful economic, political, spatial, and discursive practices that render them invisible, thus facilitating their exploitation and reproducing the structures of symbolic violence that furthers their social suffering. In spite of their invisibility, farmworkers demonstrate enormous political agency and collectively organize to defend their rights. A worker-led movement of striking mushroom pickers in Salem, Oregon in 2001 demonstrates this. Through collaborative research with workers who led the movement and the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) union, this investigation brings the voices of these workers to the forefront through the documentary medium. Collaborative research and new and participatory forms of social media offer exciting avenues for documenting and disseminating farmworker testimony.