2007-09
Democracy
and Citizenship
in the 21st
Century
2005-07
Indigenous Peoples:
National Policy
and International
Human Rights
2003-05
The Changing
Geopolitical Order
2001-03
Race, Class, and the Criminal Justice System
2000-01
Labor in a
Global Economy
1999-2000
The Rich, the Poor,
and American Politics
Current Theme: Democracy and Citizenship in the 21st Century (2007-09)
This page displays past events from the current theme of “Democracy
and Citizenship in the 21st Century”
archived here by date, activity and
description.
Wayne Morse Chair Professor
Arturo Escobar, occupied the Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics in 2007-08. He is the Kenan Distinguished Teaching Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Escobar's public address, “Left Turn? Right Turn? Where is Latin America Going? Perspectives from Development, Implications for Democracy,” focused on recent political developments in Latin America and examined their underlying nature.
Resident Scholars
|
Garrett Epps, 2007-08 Wayne Morse Resident Scholar and Hollis
Garrett
Epps, 2007-08 Wayne Morse Center Resident and Hollis
Professor of Law, conducted research into the birthright
citizenship guarantee of the 14th Amendment. Epps is
the author of Democracy Reborn: The
Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights
in Post-Civil War America. A former staff writer
for the Washington Post, he is the author of two novels
and numerous articles and books on constitutional law.
His book on Oregon's famous peyote case, To an
Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, was a
finalist for the American Bar Association Silver Gavel
Award in 2002. Epps convened a symposium on Immigration
and Citizenship held on January 25, 2008.
Gordon
Lafer, 2007-08 Wayne Morse Center Resident and Associate Professor at the Labor Education and
Research Center and the Department of Political Science,
researched issues of
democracy at the workplace. Lafer
has studied the nature of union elections and advocates
for changes to U.S. labor law to improve workplace democracy. He gave a talk on Monday, April 7, 2008 at the Knight Law Center entitled, “Enduring Feudalism? The State of Federal Labor Law” This talk included discussions of the difference between employer and employee-free speech rights at the workplace, and it examined the legal rights of employees to participate as citizens in elections to public office compared with workplace elections for unionization.
|
Gordon Lafer, 2007-08 Wayne Morse Resident ScholarVideo, articles and slide show lecture about or by Gordon Lafer:
“Secret
Ballot in Name Only” a
February 2007 Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee
on Labor and Education, on the absence of a true secret ballot
in Labor Board election (YouTube video)
“Scholar
criticizes labor law in U.S.” Oregon Daily Emerald, August 20, 2007
“Free
and Fair? How Labor Law Fails U.S. Democratic Election Standards” an
American Rights at Work Report, June 2005
Gordon Lafer's most recent work discusses his argument about labor law reform: Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society 1089-7011 - Volume 11, March 2008. (163K PDF).View Gordon Lafer's Slide Lecture on April 7, 2008
Distinguished Speakers
Lamia Karim, Assistant Professor Dept of Anthropology, gave a one-hour presentation at the Knight Law Center on Thursday, April 10, 2008, entitled “Ambivalent Sisterhood: Feminist Legal Reform in Bangladesh” The discussion was based on preliminary work conducted with a small grant from Wayne Morse Center) on feminist legal reform in the area of Family Laws in December 2007 in Bangladesh. It examined the role played by feminists in garnering equality for Muslim women, and how changes in Family Laws play out in the lives of poor women. This event was Cosponsored by the Women's Law Forum and the International Law Project.
Steve Bender, James L. and Ilene R. Hershner Professor of Law at the University of Oregon, gave a reading from his book, “One Night in America: Robert Kennedy, César Chávez, and the Dream of Dignity at Morse Commons in the Knight Law Center on Friday, March 14, 2008. In this book, Bender chronicles the warm friendship of Robert Kennedy and César Chávez and embraces their bold political vision for making the American dream a reality for all. While many books discuss Kennedy or Chávez individually, this is the first book to capture their multifaceted relationship and its relevance to mainstream U.S. politics and Latino/a politics today. This event is cosponsored by the Latin American Law Students Association.
Noted author Greg Grandin visited the UO in winter, 2008, to compliment the visit of Arturo Escobar and delivered a keynote address at a major conference on “Violence
and Reconciliation in Latin America: Memory, Human Rights and
Democracy.” Grandin discussed the history of U.S. involvement in Latin America and the current “transition to democracy” in historical context at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, February 1, 2008 in the Fir Room, EMU on the UO campus.
Grandin is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at New York University. His latest book is Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (71K PDF review from The Texas Observer). Grandin is also the author of The Blood of Guatemala (Duke, 2000), which won the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Book Award for best book on Latin America; and The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, 2004.) He has served on the United Nations Truth Commission for Guatemala, and has published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Harper's, The Nation, the Boston Review, and the New York Times. He has most recently been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ryskamp Fellowship Program. Read Greg Grandin's Abstract (20K PDF).
Steven M. Tipton, Author and sociologist Steve Tipton delivered a public address on “Public 
Pulpits: Religion
in the Moral Argument of Public Life” on November 19,
2007, at 7:00 p.m. at the Knight Law Center. Based
on his forthcoming book, the address offered an overview of
faith in public life and the moral ambiguity of the American polity. Steven M. Tipton teaches sociology, religion, and
ethics at Emory University and itsCandler School of Theology,
where he is Professor of Sociology of Religion. A graduate of Harvard
University with a joint Ph.D. in Sociology and the Study of Religion
in l979, he is the author of Public Pulpits, a study of
national religious advocacy by the mainline churches in Washington,
and Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion
and Cultural Change. He co-authored with Robert Bellah et
al The Good Society and Habits of the Heart,
nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A native of San Francisco, he has
worked in Harlem as a murder investigator for the New York State
Superior Court, and played semi-professional baseball in California.
Additional Information:
- Press Release
- View Tipton's Web Page and Schedule
- Summary of Public Pulpits
- Comments by Martin Marty about Public Pulpits, noted scholar of religion
- View Steven Tipton webcast (1 hour, 35 minutes — takes over a minute to load)
Ron Dellums is currently the Mayor of Oakland, California and served as a member of Congress. He was to receive the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award at an event sponsored by the Wayne Morse Historical Park Corporation on Friday, October 26 at a dinner event at Eugene's Valley River Inn.
Ron Dellums retired from the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998 after serving for 27 years as an advocate for peace and justice. He is internationally known for his early advocacy to end the Vietnam War, his visionary leadership in helping to end U.S. support for the racist apartheid regime of South Africa, and his crucial role in bringing the HIV/AIDS pandemic to light in this country. He also provided outstanding leadership as the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and as the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Additional Information: Press Release (from the Wayne Morse Historical Park Board)
Wayne Morse Center Events
Friday, January 25, 2008
Symposium — Immigration and Citizenship
A one-day symposium was led by 2007-08 Wayne Morse Resident Scholar and Hollis Professor of Law
Garrett Epps, featuring Kevin Johnson at the University of California–Davis, Hiroshi
Motomura at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and John Eastman of Chapman University School of
Law.
This symposium was a free event and open to the public. Currently the most debated citizenship issue involves the contested terrain of immigration. This symposium presented several of the nation's leading scholars on constitutional law and immigration policy. Speakers analyzed U.S. migration policy and argued for more openness and attention to the concept of citizenship. The morning panel featured a dialogue on the birthright citizenship guarantee of the 14th Amendment. The afternoon panel included community advocates discussing the politics of immigration policy at a local level.
Additional Information:
Thursday, Friday & Saturday
January 31 to February 2, 2008
Two-Day Conference — Violence and Reconciliation in Latin America:
Human Rights, Memory and Democracy
Many Latin American countries went through periods of extreme violence in which hundreds of thousands of people were murdered, disappeared, tortured, orphaned, displaced, and exiled. Repressive and militarized states sought to eliminate – both politically and physically – various types of democratic, nationalist, and insurrectional movements. These regimes of the 1970s and 1980s defined oppositional movements as enemies of the nation and engaged in systematic abuses of human rights and egregious violations of constitutional principles. This era of state-sponsored terror left a legacy of collective trauma and material destruction that continues to haunt Latin America today. As the period of military repression ebbed and governments returned to both constitutional rule and restricted forms of democracy, questions and debates emerged about how to deal with the recent past and how to build a peaceful future: the search for both the truth about what happened and the best ways to secure reconciliation became the dominant theme in those debates.
These themes resonate globally today as the war in Iraq and the “Global War on Terror” have produced some of the same circumstances and questions.
- Whose truth do we listen to? How are human rights abuses and the undermining of democracy constructed in official and unofficial memory?
- How is violence remembered and documented? Is liberal democracy an antidote to human rights abuses?
- What kind of “memory” and “history” have official truth commissions produced?
- Whom did they represent?
- How was their “truth” arrived at?
Keynote lectures by Wayne Morse Scholar Arturo Escobar titled, “Left Turn, Right Turn? Where is Latin America Going?”; by Greg Grandin, the 2008 Bartolomé de las Casas Lecturer in Latin American Studies titled, “Remembering Latin America’s Other ‘Transition to Democracy;” and by Arturo Arias titled, “The Ghosts of the Past, Human Dignity, and the Collective Need for Reparation.”
Panel topics include:
- “Whose Truth? Reassessing Truth Commissions’ Reports”
- “Battling for Memory: Alternative and Non-official Accounts of Violence”
- “Political Prisoners: Testimony and Survival,” “Memory in Film and Documentaries”
- “Gender, Violence, and Human Rights in Present-Day Latin America.”
- Case studies will be presented from Peru, Guatemala, Chile, Colombia,
Mexico Argentina, and the U.S.
Additional Information:
- Press Release
- View Violence and Reconciliation website and schedule
- View Poster
- Eugene Weekly Article
- View keynote speaker Arturo Escobar's Slide Lecture (01-31-08)
Monday, October 8, 2007
Symposium
— Examining Guantánamo
Organized by the Wayne Morse Fellows
A panel of experts discussed legal issues raised by the detention
of prisoners at the U.S. Naval base in Guantánamo Bay during a
symposium on Monday, Oct. 8 at the University of Oregon. The
Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics sponsored the free public
event, which was held from
3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in room 175, Knight Law
Center, 1515 Agate St.
Panelists included Steve Wax, the federal public defender for the District of Oregon who representing seven Guantánamo Bay detainees; Tom Johnson, legal counsel for Guantánamo Bay detainee Ihlkham Battayav; and Ibrahim Gassama, a UO law professor who has done extensive work on human rights and foreign policy issues. Garrett Epps, the 2007-08 Morse Center Resident Scholar and the UO Hollis Professor of Law moderated the discussion.
The panel considered whether current legal processes protect the rights of non-citizens in a democracy and explored the implications of U.S. treatment of non-citizens during times of war. The discussion focused on legal strategies for defending the Guantánamo Bay detainees.
Additional Information:
SLIDE SHOW - Click image to view next... (1-6)
October
5, 6, 7, 2007
Film Fest — Politics of Dissent:
Human Stories For Our Times
Bijou Art Cinemas
492 East 13th Ave. Eugene
PH:
(541) 686-2458
This special slate of five international, American contemporary and classic 35 mm films was presented by Eugene Weekly in conjunction with the University of Oregon’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, which is sponsoring a two-year examination of Democracy and Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century.
These films included Medium Cool (1969), Road to Guantánamo (2006), Osama (2004), Iraq in Fragments (2006), and 12 Angry Men (1957). For more detailed information about each of the films, see the link to the web page below:
Additional Information:
- View Film Fest Web Page
- Eugene
Weekly Film Fest insert - published 09/27/07 (308K PDF)
Project Grants
The Wayne Morse Center awarded several project grants for 2007-08 relevant to the current theme, “Democracy and Citizenship in the 21st Century”
Eugene Weekly Film Festival. “Democracy and Citizenship in the 21st Century” theme films to be shown at the Bijou Theatre.
October 5, 6 & 7, 2007
International Migration and Citizenship.
Anthropology course taught by Marcela Mendoza, adjunct faculty in the Anthropology Department, 300-level course on “International Migration and Citizenship.”
Fall 2007
City of Eugene Human Rights Commission. Human Rights Commission of the City of Eugene symposium, “Bring Human Rights Home: Implementing International Human Rights in the United States."
November 2007
Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW). Visiting Kenyan scholar Michael Ochieng Odhiambo was scheduled to give a talk.
November 2007
Ambivalent Sisterhood: Feminist Legal Reform and Female Subjectivity in Bangladesh and Malaysia. Lamia Karim, Associate Professor in the UO Anthropology Department, research examining the role of Islamic feminists and secularists in securing Muslim women’s citizenship rights.
April 10, 2008
Civil Liberties Defense Center. Summer stipend for public interest law students conducting research for various Center projects.
Gender, Families and Immigration in Oregon. Conference on “Gender, Families and Immigration in Oregon” sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society with community participation.
May 2008
UO MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan). For annual Raza Unida Youth Conference. Public Interest Public Service Program (PIPS).
May 2008
Constitutional Law Section of the Oregon State Bar. “The Evolution of the Oregon Constitution: An Exercise in Democracy” video project expected to be completed in 2009.
Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics
1221 University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1221
Phone: (541) 346-3700, Fax: (541) 346-1564
