The department of cinema studies is committed to providing an inclusive environment where diversity of thought and expression are valued and respected. The department's shared mission is to use its critical and creative tools to amplify underrepresented voices, interrogate power, and drive change in the study and practice of filmmaking.
The department established a diversity committee whose mission is to foster an inclusive departmental climate that recognizes and celebrates diversity as central to its success as educators, researchers, practitioners, workers, and students. While the department values all forms of diversity, cinema studies is especially committed to increasing representation of those populations and voices that have been historically underrepresented in higher education, cinema and media studies, and cinema and media production, regardless of immigration status.
The diversity committee has been tasked with transforming ideas into action and will do the following:
- Lead the Cinema Studies community in fostering an inclusive and equitable departmental climate by advocating on behalf of students, faculty, and staff.
- Develop best practices for the recruitment and retention of students, faculty, and staff from historically underrepresented groups.
- Promote and support diversity and social justice related teaching, research, and creative work.
- Connect faculty, staff, and students to resources related to diversity and inclusivity in teaching, research, learning, and media production.
- Create opportunities for the department to discuss diversity and inclusivity through various forums, including but not limited to screenings, workshops, visiting scholars and filmmakers, town hall meetings, and community outreach and events.
Tactics and Progress
Tactic #1: Establish an undergraduate award for creative work, targeting social justice issues
Progress: During the 2018-19 academic year, the diversity committee established the Undergraduate Filmmaker Award to recognize undergraduate students whose filmmaking and/or media production enhances the inclusion of marginalized identities and communities in front of and behind the camera, tells stories about issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, national/ethnic identity, and/or uses the medium to fight for social justice. An award of up to $500 is given to the top recipients.
Tactic #2: A speaker/screening series with guest speakers whose creative works highlight social justice issues and is open to the UO community
Progress: Each term the department offers financial and promotional support to events across campus and in the community that share the mission of highlighting social justice issues and provide students with a forum to discuss diversity and inclusivity–everything from screenings and Q&As with filmmakers to film festivals to research talks. Examples of events that the department has sponsored include:
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Screenings and Filmmaker Discussions:
- Call Me By Your Name screening and Q&A with Oscar-winning writer, director, and UO alum James Ivory, ‘51
- Documented screening and Q&A with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas
- Dolores screening and discussion with director Peter Bratt
- Screening of Harvest of Empire: The Untold Stories of Latinos in America
- Screenings of The Rider and Songs My Brothers Taught Me and Q&As with director Chloé Zhao
- Talking Black in America documentary screening and panel discussion
- Veterans Speak: Identity, Community, Resistance Disruption: A screening of A Soldier’s Home and Grounds for Resistance and Q&As with the directors
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Film Festivals on campus and in the community:
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Scholar Speakers, Faculty Research Talks, and Discussions:
- BEseries dinner and presentation with writer Fatimah Asghar
- Cinema Studies Feminist Media Studies Symposium
- Cinema Studies Associate Professor Priscilla Peña Ovalle Work in Progress Talk: "From Black Hair to Black Panther: Collaborative Scholarship and Thinking through Cinematic Blackness”
- Cinema Studies Associate Professor Sangita Gopal Work-in-Progress Talk: "Coalition as Possession: Gender, Ecology, and the Indian New Wave Cinema”
- Film Discussion and Book Celebration: Producing Literature & Film for Queer Latinx Youth
- Pacific NW Ethnic Studies Undergraduate Research Symposium
- PTSD: A Veteran Panel Discusses Representation in Film
- Taiwanese Women's First-Person Documentaries