Presented by the Oregon Humanities Center.

The Oregon Humanities Center will present a Wine Chat with anthropologist Kristin Yarris discussing her co-edited volume Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities.

The book features writing by anthropologists whose work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a mode of engagement inspired by feminist care ethics, decolonial methodologies, and Latin American activist traditions of acompañamiento, or accompaniment. 

Contributors to this volume respond to and address present sociopolitical conditions: entrenched inequality, heightened xenophobia, unbridled white nationalism, and the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, with its disparate impacts on marginalized and impoverished communities. They reflect on how the current political and historical moment has inspired and shaped their scholarship and relationships as engaged anthropologists working with im/migrant communities.

These writers describe how and why their roles may shift from scholar to social worker, observer to friend, witness to advocate. They describe fighting deportations, engaging in social protest, writing reports and editorials, developing immigrant-friendly programs, advocating for inclusive health and social policies, and fostering systems of support for migrants—accompaniment acts as a grounding force, a being with and standing alongside, a form of care that shifts scholars away from traditional ways of doing ethnography into more unsettled but productive spaces of possibility for solidarity and social justice.

Kristin Yarris is an associate professor in the Department of Global Studies at the UO. Her research focuses primarily on transnational migration and global mental health. She helped launch the UO’s Global Health Initiative and the Center for Global Health. She is affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Center for the Study of Women in Society and has served on the OHC’s Faculty Advisory Board. Yarris was a 2018–19 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. 

Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities (2024), co-edited with Whitney Duncan, Anthropology, Northern Colorado University, was published with support from the OHC/CAS Subvention Program.

Yarris’s Wine Chat is free and open to the public. Beverages are available for purchase and a food cart is on the premises of Capitello Wines. There is ample parking at Banner Bank across the street. Please register.

Presented by the Oregon Humanities Center

Our world has become rife with peril and uncertainty. Indigenous writer Patty Krawec asks, “How do we survive everything that is happening? From climate change to polarizing politics to a seemingly endless cycle of displacement and erasure for modern-day land grabs, we live in a world that profits from instability and precarity. How do we survive? We survive not by drawing boundaries around ourselves and hoarding resources that must be expended to protect what will inevitably slip through our fingers. We survive by becoming kin. By remembering what it means to be related not only to each other but to the worlds around us. Revisiting our traditional stories, whatever those traditions may be, and re-imagining them in our contemporary world, can help us find new ways to see each other and forge the solidarities we need to survive.” 

As the 2024–25 Robert D. Clark lecturer Patty Krawec will give a talk titled “Surviving Together.”

Krawec is an Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker belonging to the Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory Canada. 

She is a founding director of the Nii’kinaaganaa (we are all related) Foundation which challenges settlers to pay rent for living on Indigenous land and disburses those funds to Indigenous people, meeting immediate survival needs as well as supporting the organizing and community building needed to address the structural issues that create those needs.

In her book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (2022) Krawec critiques the harmful impact of European Christian settler colonialism on Indigenous Americans. She details Indigenous American history from the first humans to populate the Americas through the present and outlines ways in which descendants of European colonizers and Indigenous people can become ‘good relatives’. 

Krawec’s talk, part of this year’s “Re-imagine” series, is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed and recorded. Please register.

Presented by the Oregon Humanities Center

Reproductive justice is a critical framework that was developed in response to reproductive politics in the US. Three core values of reproductive justice are the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments.  

LGBTQIA+ individuals need and deserve unimpeded access to full spectrum reproductive health care services. Far too often the movements for reproductive health and rights only center the needs of cisgender and heterosexual individuals and couples. Yet, the reality is: everyone needs reproductive health care regardless of gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Candace Bond-Theriault will discuss the need to center LGBTQIA+ communities in the conversation about reproductive health, rights, and justice in a talk titled “Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation to Create Our Collective Future.” As this year’s Colin Ruagh Thomas O’Fallon Memorial Lecturer on Law and American Culture, Bond-Theriault will extend an invitation to all people who care about justice and equity to stake a claim in the fight for collective liberation. 

Bond-Theriault asserts that for reproductive justice to be truly successful, we must acknowledge that members of the LGBTQIA+ community often face distinct, specific, and interlocking oppressions when it comes to these rights. Family formation, contraception needs, and appropriate support from healthcare services are still poorly understood aspects of the LGBTQIA+ experience, which often challenge mainstream notions of the nuclear family.  

Candace Bond-Theriault, JD, LLM, is a queer lawyer, writer, mother, and social justice advocate working at the intersections of law, policy, reproductive health rights, racial justice, LGBTQIA+ liberation, economic justice, and democracy reform. She is Adjunct Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University, and Associate Director for Movement Building at Dēmos, a think tank for the Racial Justice Movement.

Her book Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation (2024), blends advocacy with a legal, rights-based framework and offers a unified path for attaining reproductive justice for LGBTQIA+ people. Drawing on US law and legislative history, healthcare policy, human rights, and interviews, Bond-Theriault presents incisive new recommendations for queer reproductive justice theory, organizing, and advocacy. 

Bond-Theriault’s talk, part of this year’s “Re-imagine” series, is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed and recorded. Please register.

Strengthen social and family connection while learning about Oregon’s history with a night at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Dinner and activities for all ages provided. This event is free and open to all graduate students and their chosen families.

RSVP

Presented by the Oregon Humanities Center

Deepa Iyer is this year's Lorwin Lecturer. Over the course of two decades supporting social movements, Deepa Iyer has played many roles: weaver, frontline responder, storyteller, and guide. Currently, she is the Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives at Building Movement Project where she builds projects, resources, and narratives around transformative solidarity practices. Iyer’s primary areas of expertise include post September 11th policies, civil rights, and Asian American/South Asian histories of community building. She has previously held positions at Race Forward, South Asian Americans Leading Together, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, and the Asian American Justice Center.

She is the author of two books, We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future (The New Press 2015) about post 9/11 America, and Social Change Now: A Guide for Reflection and Connection (The Thick Press, 2022) about the social change ecosystem framework that she developed. She also hosts a podcast called Solidarity Is This featuring storytellers, disrupters, and builders around the world who are experimenting with solidarity during a time of polarization.

Iyer has received fellowships from Open Society Foundations and the Social Change Initiative, and in 2019, she received an honorary doctoral degree from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. She serves on the Advisory Council of the Emergent Fund, which resources grassroots organizing and power building in communities of color.

An immigrant who moved to Kentucky from India when she was twelve, Iyer graduated from the University of Notre Dame Law School and Vanderbilt University. More information about Iyer’s work is at www.socialchangemap.com and www.buildingmovement.org.