It is the only four-year institution, public or private, located in central and eastern Oregon, an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania, but with a human population of only 100,000.
People barely outnumber elk.
Eastern also has the last federally funded Micronesian Program, with about 50 students from a wide array of islands, as well as a strong Native American Program affiliated with many regional tribes. The bodylore assignment that we will present here have grown from Eastern s institutional culture. We evolved an approach using multiple genres, disciplines, cultures and media in order to help students connect their academic and personal lives and to take greater pleasure in theories across the disciplines and their application. These innovations have been central to a re-shaping of the English Writing Program at Eastern to include a Discourse Studies track and a minor in Interdisciplinary Writing and Rhetoric. Among the special pleasures of the body projects we ask our students to develop is that they mix corporeality and rationality and make the body a subject for passionate inquiry and thought.