UO Professors and Students Launch Digital Ethnography Website About the Oaxaca Social Movement in Mexico

The website includes background information about the histories of different social movements in Oaxaca during the past three decades and a video timeline of key events of the Oaxaca social movement from June through October of 2006.

Oaxaca, Mexico mraroaxaca.uoregon.edu/

(EUGENE, Ore.) - In 2006, a group of women in Oaxaca, Mexico took over television and radio stations in support of striking teachers who were being brutalized by state police forces and paramilitary groups.

These women and their stories compose one of six chapters on a new website, “Making Rights a Reality,” mraroaxaca.uoregon.edu/.

University of Oregon faculty and graduate students developed the website to provide direct access to the story as told by those who participated in and observed it.

With more than 35 video-testimonials supplemented with text, photographs and documents, the website is intended to inform students, teachers, researchers and activists about human rights, indigenous rights, women’s rights, media activism, participatory democracy and Latin American social movements.

“The heart of this project is a set of inter-linked testimonials by teachers and others who were illegally detained, tortured and imprisoned for their political activities. The testimonials are urgent oral accounts of bearing witness to wrongs committed against the speakers, as well as descriptions and analysis of events of the social movement,” said Lynn Stephen, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon.

Stephen is also the associate director for program development at the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS). CSWS funded the website and will sponsor a launch event from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 28, Knight Law Center, Room 110, 1515 Agate St. The event is co-sponsored by the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) and the Latin American Studies Program. The event is free and open to the public.

According to Stephen, the website was conceived of as a digital ethnography that lets viewers hear the voices of those who participated and observed the Oaxaca social movement of 2006.

Ethnography is a form of documentation which strives to produce understanding through richness, texture and detail focused through the perspectives of local actors who directly experienced and witnessed events.

In addition to video testimonials and photographs, the website includes background information about the histories of different social movements in Oaxaca during the past three decades and a video timeline of key events of the Oaxaca social movement from June through October of 2006.

“The flexibility of digital media permits viewers to experience the interconnectedness of the different dimensions of the Oaxaca movement,” said Stephen. “It also highlights the links between individual experiences through testimony with the larger political, economic and cultural context.”

Souce: University of Oregon

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