Lynn Stephen Research

Dr. Stephen is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) http://cllas.uoregon.edu/ at the University of Oregon. She has also recently served as co-coordinator (2009-2011) for University of Oregon initiative “The Americas in a Globalized World: Linking Diversity and Internationalization.” http://uoamericas.uoregon.edu/ Her work has centered on the intersection of culture and politics. Born in Chicago, Illinois she has a particular interest in the ways that political identities articulate with ethnicity, gender, class, and nationalism in relation to local, regional, and national histories, cultural politics, and systems of governance in Latin America and the U.S. During the past fifteen years she has also engaged the themes of immigration, human rights, neoliberal political-economies, collaborative ethnography, and social movements in her research. She has conducted research in Mexico, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, and the U.S. Her newest books include Otros Saberes: Collaborative Research on Indigenous and Afro-Descendent Cultural Politics, co-edited with Chares R. Hale (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, in press), and We are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements (in press, Duke University Press). Other books include Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon (Duke University Press, 2007), Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas (co-edited with Shannon Speed and Aída Hérnandez Castillo (University of Texas Press, 2006), Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2005), Perspectives on Las Américas: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation, co-edited with Matt Gutmann, Felix Matos Rodríguez, & Pat Zavella (Blackwell Publishers Limited, 2003), Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (University of California Press, 2002), Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power From Below (University of Texas Press, 1997), and Hear My Testimony: María Teresa Tula, Human Rights Activist of El Salvador (South End Press, 1994). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, The Center for U.S.- Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, The Mexican Academy of Sciences, and research grants from the National Science Foundation, The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The Ford Foundation, and the Inter-American Foundation, among others. In 2007 she received the “Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America” from the Society for the Anthropology of North America. She has a strong commitment to collaborative research and to projects that produce findings that are accessible to the wider public. She has recently conducted research on identity formation and political and civic participation among Mexican immigrant youth in Mexico and Oregon that is ongoing in collaboration with her students and colleagues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Other research projects include web-based digital ethnographies and videos. “Latino Roots ” done in collaboration with Professor Gabriela Martínez, the Lane County Historical Museum, Latino community consultants, graduate and undergraduate students, focuses on the oral histories of the diverse group of Latino immigrants and migrants found in Oregon. The project has resulted in a museum exhibit, oral history texts, videos, classes and websites. See http://cllas.uoregon.edu/ research/latino-roots/ and http://latinoroots.uoregon.edu/our-course/ Making Rights a Reality: The Oaxaca Social Movement 2006 – Present. May 28, 2009 launch. http://www.mraroaxaca.uoregon.edu/ This website documents the 2006 social movement of Oaxaca, Mexico and its relationship to the global discourse on human, women´s and indigenous rights. With more than 35 video testimonials supplemented with text, photographs and reproduction of documents, it offers the public—students, teachers, researchers, activists and other interested parties—direct access to the story of this social movement as told by those who participated in it and others who observed it first-hand. The website is a companion to Stephen’s forthcoming book, We are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements.