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Lynn Stephen
Public Anthropologist
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Professor Lynn Stephen
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In her anthropology courses, Lynn Stephen engages students in discussion about cultural similarities and differences around the world, but she also teaches by example, involving them in research projects and providing them with opportunities to see how advocacy can relate to anthropology.
UO students like Rachel Hansen (’03) receive the invaluable experience of “doing anthropology” and seeing their work impact lives. Hansen worked with Stephen on “The Life of a Strawberry: Labor Relations from Field to Dinner Plate,” a project that followed the path of produce from the Willamette Valley to the dinner plates of UO students, highlighting the gendered and ethnic dimensions of labor relations in the food production process. She helped conduct interviews and observations in the fields, as well as with frozen food warehouses, distributors, and workers in UO food service.
But the project didn’t stop there.
Stephen then challenged her students to take their research and transform it into a bilingual educational play, to be performed for farm workers, at a labor conference, and in university and junior high classrooms. Throughout, Stephen served as an inspiration for her students, says Hansen: “She was organizing us, but also giving us enough space and time. She would let us find our own passions about the subject matter and [our own] reasons for being there.”
The outreach component of this project also highlights Stephen’s commitment to “public anthropology.” As a researcher, she works to make sure that her work is relevant and helpful to those she studies.
“She challenges outdated anthro-pological paradigms and offers a bold example of engaged research,” says colleague Carol Silverman. “A hallmark of her work is the integration of analysis of national and international political and economic conditions with local understandings, interpretations and responses to these conditions.”
Though Stephen has conducted research in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and El Salvador, her work has focused on Mexico during the past decade. Her most recent book is “Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico,” which was published in 2002 and has since been adopted in many college classrooms studying Latin America.
This distinguished professor brought her diverse interests and broad expertise to the University of Oregon campus in 1998, after teaching appointments at M.I.T. and Northeastern University. Stephen says she especially values the West Coast’s opportunities to be closer to—and bring her students within reach of—prime research locations.
"Being at the University of Oregon and in Oregon is very exciting, and I’ve forged unique links,” she said. “Moving from Boston, I’m in a position of really connecting with the work I’m doing in Mexico.”
During the summer, Stephen did field work in Oaxaca, learning about indigenous textile weaving cooperatives formed by workers who once lived in the United States. And, this fall, Stephen will lead a student team in researching the impact of immigration on rural America. While the UO student team will focus on the community of Woodburn, Oreg., their work will be part of a larger national comparative project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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1245 University of Oregon • Eugene, OR • 97403-1245
(541) 346.3950 • FAX (541) 346.3282 • alumnidev@cas.uoregon.edu
Copyright © 2003 University of Oregon
Updated October 3, 2003
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