The pop-up exhibition “Arts of Intervention” brings together an international group of artists connected to the working group on “Women Mobilizing Memory” of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference in the context of the Third Annual Memory Studies Association Conference in Madrid, June, 2019.
Reframing Gendered Violence Human Rights Defenders Workshop “Voices on the Ground” in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
The Papua New Guinea National Research Institute (PNG NRI) Building Safer Communities Program and the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, are conducting a workshop on Reframing Gendered Violence in Port Moresby. The Reframing Gendered Violence workshop in Port Moresby stems from the Center for the Study of Social Difference’s annual seminar that is conducted at the Columbia University in New York. This program brings speakers to talk about how gender based violence is understood and addressed in different contexts.
“Part of CSSD’s Women Creating Change projects, the Reframing Gendered Violence working group engages critically with the terms, assumptions, and policies that have underwritten this unprecedented outpouring of attention. When invoked in the United Nations and used to shape international policy, VAW and GBV are often assumed to have stable meanings, yet they do not. What do different parties mean when they talk of violence against women or of gender-based violence? Do they focus primarily on sexual violence, occurring in domestic settings? What is left out when the problem is framed in this way, and whose interests are served by such a framing?” (Europe Journal, 2017). The focus of the workshop is on the recently launched ‘Human Rights Defenders’ Association. Therefore, the aim of the workshop is to create a space where the human rights defenders can tell their own stories.
The theme of the workshop is ‘Voices on the ground,’ to encourage participation and telling of the story by the Human Rights Defenders.
Briefly, the HRDs are community leaders based in Port Moresby who were trained by UNWomen to become human rights defenders. Most were community activists well before they were trained and named as HRDs. Many wear ‘different hats’, as village courts officials, community mobilisers, and justice community leaders apart from HRD. Despite many challenges, these community leaders have been preventing and addressing human rights issues, including gender based violence in their communities for many years. There are approximately 230 Port Moresby based HRDs.
Some of the discussion points include:
• HRD’s work before they were recognized and trained by UNWomen?
• What are some preventive and response method they use to address GBV in their communities?
• How would they describe themselves before, compared to now?
• What are some challenges they face in their communities?
• What can we learn from the experiences of HRDs?
The NRI will be documenting the stories of the HRD and submitting a joint publication with the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University. The learnings from this workshop, will capture the HRD’s stories and how they prevent and address GBV within their communities.
Workshop speakers include:
Fiona Hukula
Mary Fairo
Paige West
Agnes Rau
Linda Tule
Khanu Gibson
Cathy Amalu
Sabet Peter
Janet Awe
Madlin Po’o
Sala Samuel
Margaret Au
Women CLAP BACK: Music and the Arts is a series of programmed events featuring woman-identified speakers working on the fringes of music and the arts that speak about their interventions in the White and patriarchal dynamics of their fields. The goal of CLAP BACK is to foster cross-disciplinary conversation among musicians, composers, multimedia artists, playwrights, bloggers, academics, and activists. The inaugural CLAP BACK premiered at The New School / Eugene Lang College in April 2016.
This second event will feature film director and visual artist James Spooner, who directed 2003's Afropunk: The Rock n' Roll Experience, a groundbreaking independent film that sparked a global movement. Centered on the experiences of black rock, punk and hardcore musicians in New York City, it spearheaded a nationwide conversation on black artists within the DIY (Do-it-Yourself) underground music scenes. Most importantly, it highlighted the experiences of black women who successfully navigated their gender and ethnocultural status while actively participating within these white-centric and male-dominated genres and cultures that have historically been resistant to marginalized communities. This event, free and open to the public will include women who were featured in the 2003 documentary, as well as young women of color who are currently involved in the New York punk and hardcore scenes.
At this event, we will screen the 70-minute documentary and Spooner will give a presentation on the making of the documentary, as well as discuss the cultural shift that has happened in the 15+ years since the initial release. We will also moderate a panel of 3-4 women on their experiences as artists within the underground music scenes.
Join CSSD’s Women Creating Change for a livestream viewing party to celebrate Campus ERA Day. We will be livestreaming the event and interacting with panelists. The goal of this event is to spread awareness of and to gain support for the reviatlized push to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was introduced in Congress to ensure that women were equal under the law and prevent sex-based discrimination. Almost one hundrd years later, the United States Constitution still does not guarantee equal rights for women!
On Monday April 15, The Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) co-sponsors “Donde antes tú ahora el vacío.”: Mourning the Absent Bodies of the US-Mexico border in Sara Uribe’s Antígona González with CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch.
Organized by the The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the event will bring together Miguel Alirangues Lopez (PHD Candidate at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) in conversation, discussing Lopez’s work on Sara Uribe’s Antígona González.
Mexican poet Sara Uribe is one of the most remarkable voices of her generation. Her influential work Antígona González (2012) is the story of a woman who searches for the body of her missing brother on the US-Mexico border, with the determination to bury him, just like Sophocles’ classical heroine. Miguel Alirangues (PhD Candidate at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) will be in conversation, commenting on Uribe’s discursive strategies to mourn the effects of generalized violence in the context of the Mexican Drug War.
Please join CSSD working group Menstrual Health and Gender Justice in welcoming Chris Bobel to speak about her new book "The Managed Body: Developing Girls & Menstrual Health in the Global South.”
”The Managed Body" productively complicates ‘menstrual hygiene management’ (MHM)—a growing social movement to support menstruating girls in the Global South. Bobel offers an invested critique of the complicated discourses of MHM including its conceptual and practical links with the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) development sector, human rights and ‘the girling of development.’ Drawing on analysis of in-depth interviews, participant observations and the digital materials of NGOs and social businesses, Bobel shows how MHM frames problems and solutions to capture attention and direct resources to this highly-tabooed topic. She asserts that MHM organizations often inadvertently rely upon weak evidence and spectacularized representations to make the claim of a ‘hygienic crisis’ that authorizes rescue. And, she argues, the largely product-based solutions that follow fail to challenge the social construction of the menstrual body as dirty and in need of concealment. While cast as fundamental to preserving girls’ dignity, MHM prioritizes ‘technological fixes’ that teach girls to discipline their developing bodies vis a vis consumer culture, a move that actually accommodates more than it resists the core problem of menstrual stigma.
Bobel is an associate professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and is a faculty fellow in the MHGJ working group. You can read more about Bobel and view selected publications here.
Books will be available for purchase.
Food will be provided.
Event Contact Information:
Michelle Chouinard
mc4225@columbia.edu
Please join CSSD working group Racial Capitalism for a salon in celebration of Manu Karuka’s new book Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019)
This event will be moderated by CSSD project director Jack Halberstam in conversation with Manu Karuka, Audra Simpson, Sandy Grande, and Karl Jacoby.
The event is free and open to the public.
Additional support provided by the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality (IRWGS) at Columbia University; and the American Studies Program at Barnard College.
The Center for the Study of Social Difference working group Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy presents its closing conference:
This day-long conference invites sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and artists, to investigate the global history of capitalism as a racialized and gendered formation.
Click here to watch the conference keynote lecture from Professor Silvia Federici (Hofstra University)
9:00-9:15AM
OPENING REMARKS
Sarah Muir and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, co-directors
9:15-10:30AM
DEBT AS GOVERNANCE
Andrew Ross, New York University | “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay”
Miriam Muniz, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras | “Taken Island/Isla Tomada”
Caitlin Zaloom, New York University | “Priceless Poential: Middle Class Life and Student Debt in American Families”
10:45-12:00PM
REIMAGINING DEBT
Max Haiven , Lakehead University | “The Revenge of Debt or the Debt of Revenge? Artists Working with Wampum and Money”
Aleksandra Perisic, University of Miami | “Trans-Atlantic Indebtedness in the Literary Imagination”
Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Columbia University | “ Valor y Cambio Project: Art, Narrative, and Decolonial Joy”
12:15-1:30PM
NO MORE DEBT
Soo-Young Kim, Princeton University | “Austerity turns Debt into a Crisis”
Jerome Roos, London School of Economics | “A Very Brief History of Sovereign Default”
Sarah Muir, City University of New York | “Eternal Debt? Long-term Experiences of Debt and Default in Argentina”
1:30-2:30PM
LUNCH BREAK
3:00-4:30PM
CLOSING KEYNOTE | Rm 201 Casa Hispanica , 612 W 116th Street
Silvia Federici, Hofstra University | “Women, Microcredit, and Debt: A Feminist Perspective”
4:30-5:30PM
RECEPTION | Rm 201 Casa Hispanica , 612 W 116th Street
Special thanks to our cosponsor the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures (LAIC).
A round-table with Ariella Azoulay (Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies, and Comparative Literature, Brown University), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Professor of French and Philosophy, and Director of the Institute for African Studies, Columbia University) and Brian Wallis (Curator, The Walther Collection), Moderated by Marianne Hirsch and Andreas Huyssen.
Co-Sponsors: University Seminar on Cultural Memory, Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, Maison Francaise.
The Center for the Study of Social Difference’s Women Creating Change is proud to cosponor this year’s #Startup Columbia Festival. We have quite a line up of female founders and alumnae innovators who are solving problems around the globe to make a better world. The list includes:
Alice Bosley '17SIPA who is turning refugees into founders at her incubator in Iraq
Katherine Katcher '07CC who is mitigating the effects of mass incarceration with Root & Rebound
Dr. Courtney Cogburn, School of Social Work who is changing perspectives on unconscious racial bias
Shivani Siroya '07MPH is giving access to credit to bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers in developing countries
Anne Williams-Isom '91LAW who is running the Harlem Children's Zone helping to create a model to eradicate systemic poverty
Emmy-award winner Abby Disney '98 GSAS who will discuss this week's premiere of Women, War, & Peace, four never-before-told stories about the women who risked their lives for peace, changing history in the process
Complimentary tickets will be offered to affiliates of the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference or active members of the Women Creating Change Leadership Council. You can request your tickets by emailing cm3014@columbia.edu with "WCC" in the subject line.
Center for the Study of Social Difference co-sponsors the annual Transnational Feminist Futures roundtable conversation. This event, presented by the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality will bring together scholars and activists for a roundtable conversation on transnational feminist theorizing and activism.
Speakers:
Professors Laura Briggs (UMASS-Amherst), Paige West (Columbia/ Barnard College), Zillah Eisenstein (Ithaca College), Premilla Nadasen (Barnard College), and Linda Oalican (Damayan Migrant Workers Association).
Moderator: Selina Makana, Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality.
Participants will explore the ways that transnational feminist theorizing and practices transform and reimagine contestations over issues such as human rights, constructions of patriarchies, and inclusionary/exclusionary practices of race, sexuality, and class.
*There will be simultaneous translation during the event.
*Etkinlik sırasında İngilizce-Türkçe simultane çeviri yapılacaktır.
On March 21, Columbia Global Centers | Istanbul will host Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, in conversation with Ayşe Gül Altınay, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sabancı University and Aylin Vartanyan, Lecturer at Bogazici University. This event is organized in collaboration with SU Gender, Hrant Dink Foundation, and Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation. There will be simultaneous translation during the event.
About the Talk
Responding to the renewed monumentality of memory museums, memorials and commemorative rituals that perpetuate nationalism and ethnocentrism, this talk looks at two recent memorial projects by feminist diasporic artists from different parts of the world [Mirta Kupferminc and Wangechi Muthu] projects that explore the vicissitudes and vulnerabilities of exile and statelessness. It suggests that stateless memory can open up the possibility of imagining alternative relationships between contemporary subjects and citizenship, national belonging, and home, as well as alternate temporalities of becoming.
Professor Marianne Hirsch writes about the transmission of memories of violence across generations, combining feminist theory with memory studies in global perspective. Her recent books include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010), co-authored with Leo Spitzer, and two volumes forthcoming this year: the co-edited Women Mobilizing Memory and the co-authored School Photos in Liquid Time. The director of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, Hirsch teaches Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia.
Hafızayı Taşıyan Kadınlar: Vatansız Figürler
Columbia Üniversitesi Toplumsal Farklılık Çalışmaları Merkezi direktörü Profesör Marianne Hirsch'ü "Hafızayı Taşıyan Kadınlar: Vatansız Figürler" başlıklı konuşmasıyla 21 Mart Perşembe akşamı Studio-X Istanbul'da ağırlıyoruz. Hrant Dink Vakfı, Sabancı Üniversitesi Toplumsal Cinsiyet ve Mükemmeliyet Merkezi ve Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Derneği ile ortak olarak düzenlediğimiz bu etkinlikte, Sabancı Üniversitesi'nden Doç. Dr. Ayşe Gül Altınay ve Boğaziçi Üniversitesi'nden Öğretim Görevlisi Aylin Vartanyan da tartışmacı olarak bizlerle birlikte olacaklar. Etkinlik boyunca simultane çeviri sağlanacaktır.
Konuşma Hakkında
Milliyetçilik ve etnik merkezciliği kalıcı hale getiren hafıza müzelerinin, abidelerin ve anma törenlerinin yenilenen anıtsallığına bir cevap olarak, bu konuşma dünyanın farklı bölgelerinden feminist diaspora sanatçıları (Mirta Kupferminc ve Wangechi Muthu) tarafından yürütülen iki yakın dönem hafıza projesine değinecektir. Bu projeler sürgünün ve vatansızlığın değişimlerini ve de kırılganlıklarını araştırmaktadır. Konuşma, vatansız hafızanın günümüz özneleriyle vatandaşlık, ulusal aidiyet, vatan ve hatta oluşun farklı zamansallığı arasında alternatif ilişkileri hayal etmeyi mümkün kılabileceğini öne sürmektedir.
Marianne Hirsch, feminist teoriyi hafıza çalışmalarıyla küresel bir perspektiften birleştirerek, şiddet hafızasının kuşaktan kuşağa aktarımı üzerine yazmaktadır. Son kitapları arasında The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, (Hafıza-sonrası Kuşağı: Nazi Soykırımı Sonrası Yazım ve Görsel Kültür), Leo Spitzer ile birlikte yazdığı Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Memleketin Hayaletleri: Czernowitz’in Yahudi Hafızasındaki İzleri) yer almaktadır. Bu yıl çıkacak olan kitapları ise Spitzer ile birlikte derlediği Women Mobilizing Memory (Hafızayı Harekete Geçiren Kadınlar) ve Spitzer ile birlikte yazdığı School Photos in Liquid Time (Akışkan Zamanda Okul Fotoğrafları)’dır. Columbia Üniversitesi Toplumsal Farklılık Çalışmaları Merkezi’nin direktörü olan Hirsch Columbia Üniversitesi’nde Karşılaştırmalı Edebiyat ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet Çalışmaları dersleri vermektedir.
This event will take place at Columbia University's Studio-X Istanbul in Salıpazarı.
Etkinlik Columbia Üniversitesi'nin Salıpazarı'nda bulunan Studio-X Istanbul ofisinde gerçekleşecektir.
Wednesday, March 13, 2019 | 6:15pm - 8pm
Columbia University - Maison Francaise, East Gallery
Special thanks to our cosponsors Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and Maison Francaise
Despite gains in recent years, gender and racial disparities in the corporate sector, especially in its higher echelons, remain significant in the United States and Europe. This round table will explore successes and limitations of policies to promote diversity and inclusion. Panelists will identify successful strategies but also roadblocks and unintended consequences, and raise the issue of how backlash and stasis might be addressed.
Janice Ellig, Chief Executive Officer, Ellig Group
Yasmine Ergas, Director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy, School for International and Public Affairs and Director of Gender and Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University
Melissa Fisher, Visiting Scholar, Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, Author of Wall Street Women & member of the Women Creating Change Leadership Council
Katherine Phillips, Reuben Mark Professor of Organizational Character Management and Director
Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics
Click here to read a recent New York Times Magazine interview featuring panelist Katherine Phillips on women in corporations.
The event is free and open to the public, please register here.
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance.
Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance is available from Verso
Co-sponsored by the Racial Capitalism Working Group, the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, Barnard’s New Directions in American Studies, Verso Books, and The People’s Forum.
Register on Facebook.
This will be the third year of Queer Disruptions (QD3), and this year an international slate of esteemed scholars, activists, and artists will convene to celebrate GLQ’s 25th anniversary and to reflect on the seminal conference Black Nations/Queer Nations from 1995.
Prior to the start of the conference, we invite you to a concert performance by queer Colombian sound artist Ana Maria Romano on Wednesday, February 27, organized by the Department of Music and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. The performance will serve as an opening to what is sure to be a dynamic and enriching discussion during QD3.
This program is hosted by the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Council at Columbia University in the City of New York and sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Diversity and Inclusion.
Additional support provided by the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, the Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the Program for the Study of LGBT Health.
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION AVAILABLE HERE.
Here and Queer in Networked Space: A conversation with Zach Stafford and Jack Halberstam
moderated by Mark Hansen
5:00-6:30 pm
Brown Institute for Media Innovation
Pulitzer Hall, ground floor
Ana Maria Romano Concert and Discussion
Free and Open to the Public
7:30pm (doors at 7:15)
Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room, Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 West 129th Street, between Broadway and 12th Avenue
4pm-6pm The Forum
Black Nations/Queer Nations
Kendall Thomas (Columbia Law School), moderator
Cathy Cohen (University of Chicago)
Chandan Reddy (University of Washington)
Rinaldo Walcott (University of Toronto)
6pm-8pm The Forum
Conference Reception
10am-11:30am | The Forum
NYC Queer History and Theory
Tey Meadow (Columbia University), moderator
Kenyon Farrow (Independent Writer/Activist)
Katherine Franke (Columbia Law School)
George Chauncey (Columbia University)
11:30am-12:45pm | The Forum
Lunch
1pm-2:30pm | The Forum
Queer Art/Queer Theory
Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University), moderator
Iván Ramos (University of Maryland, College Park)
Xandra Ibarra (Independent Artist)
Kara Keeling (University of Chicago)
3pm-4:30pm | The Forum
Queer/Trans Intersections
Vanessa Agard-Jones (Columbia University), moderator
Marquis Bey (Cornell University)
Dora Silva Santana (John Jay College – CUNY)
Aren Aizura (University of Minnesota)
Boychild (Independent Artist)
8:30pm-10:30pm | KGB Bar, The Red Room (85 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003)
Trans/gression: An Evening of Performance
Curated by Kiyan Williams
Performances by Linda Labeija and NIC Kay
CSSD working group Racial Capitalism co-sponsors the launch of Manu Karuka’s new book. Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019).
Karuka’s book boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.
Click here to RSVP.
The Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture Project, co-sponsored by Precision Medicine & Society and the Center for the Study of Social Difference, welcomes Dr. Kim TallBear (University of Alberta) to give a talk on "Molecular Death, Desire, and Redface Reincarnation: Indigenous Appropriateness in the USA and Canada", on Tuesday, February 19th, 5pm-7pm, in the Seminar Room (IRWGS), 754 Schermerhorn Ext, 1200 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027.
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The event is open to the public and co-sponsored by Columbia University's Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality (IRWGS); Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER); the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities. The talk will be followed by a small reception.
The Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture Project is co-directed by Rachel Adams, PhD, Professor of English; and Maya Sabatello, LLB, PhD, Assistant Professor of Clinical Bioethics. For more information on this project, please visit socialdifference.columbia.edu
Columbia University is committed to creating an environment that includes and welcomes people with disabilities. If you need accommodations because of a disability, please email Srishti Sardana at ss4677@tc.columbia.edu as soon as possible.
CSSD working group Racial Capitalism co-sponsors Colonial Pasts and Violent Present of Confinement in Counterinsurgencies with Laleh Khalili, Professor of Middle East Politics SOAS University of London, on the evolution of modern regimes.
Detention and confinement— both of combatants and large groups of civilians—have become fixtures of asymmetric wars over the course of the last century, with a huge increase in the employment of detention camps, internment centres, and the enclosure or isolation of groups of people. Khalili examines the practices and historical roots of two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our day – the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror. She argues that although practices of incarceration have been defended by the assertion that they constitute measures to “protect” populations against violence and terrorism, liberal states have in fact consistently acted illiberally in their confinements, and that this has increasingly encouraged policymakers willingly to choose to wage wars.
There will be a reception after the talk.
Additional co-sponsorship by the Center for Social Difference, Columbia University, Barnard’s New Directions in American Studies, Verso Books, and the People’s Forum.
Moderated by Prof. Nadia Abu el-Haj
Department of Anthropology
Co-Director, Center for Palestine Studies
Columbia University
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Chair in Global Law, Queen Mary University of London and Lawrence D Biele Chair in Law, The Hebrew University in Jerusalem
Who speaks life and who speaks death in Occupied East Jerusalem? Children’s words and acts provide unique insight into the daily experiences of domination, colonization and occupation that are part of Israel’s "combat proven" politics. Surveillance, spatial control, imprisonment, torture, and professional training of security personnel have turned the old city into a showroom for states, arms companies, and security agencies to market their technologies as tested, and "combat proven." From over 600 letters written by children in the old city and observations of their daily walks to school, we can learn about the effects and refusals of these technologies of violence as they speak life. The geostrategic significance of controlling Jerusalem for Israel and the sacralized politics invoked to turn it into a “show room” speak death.
Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University
Kufr Aqab, a neighborhood in Jerusalem that was cut off from the city after the construction of the Israeli wall in 2003 has been increasingly neglected by the Jerusalem municipality. In administrative and legal limbo, outside the reach of both Israeli state and the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian neighborhoods like Kufr Aqab are frontiers on which the contours of Israeli settler-colonial geography and demography are being drawn. Palestinians live there in a liminal zone facing the realities of disposability, displaceability, and infrastructural catastrophe. How do Palestinians live and thrive in such grey zones of colonial legality? Does dwelling in-between open up grounds for imagining a new (sovereign) future?
CSSD working group Racial Capitalism presents Tankers, Tycoons, and the Making of Modern Regimes of Law, Labour, and Finance, an evening talk with Laleh Khalili, Professor of Middle East Politics SOAS University of London, on the evolution of modern regimes.
Event is FREE. Click here for more information.
Additional support for this event is provided by the Department of Anthropology, Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, The Racial Capitalism Working Group, Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, and the Middle East Institute.
Please note, the location of this event has changed. It will now be held at:
Hammer Science Building, Room 401
701 W 168th St, NYC 10032
A series to explore public health topics through the lens of different religious faiths. This event is co-sponsored by the Mailman School of Public Health, the Office of Diversity, Culture and Inclusion, and the Center for the Study of Social Difference working group Menstrual Health & Gender Justice.
Register here.
February 8-9, 2019
The Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) presents:
44th Annual Scholar and Feminist Conference: THE POLITICS AND ETHICS OF THE ARCHIVE
The Diana Center, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Friday, February 8, 4 PM–8 PM & Saturday, February 9, 10 AM–6 PM
Co-Sponsors: The Center for the Study of Social Difference (CU), Program in American Studies (BC), Barnard College Library and Archives, the Consortium of Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (BC), Digital Humanities Center (BC), Department of Africana Studies (BC), Department of English (BC), the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (CU), the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (BC), and more (list in progress).
Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra, La Vaughn Belle, Maria Cotera, Jarrett Drake, Akwaeke Emezi, Jennifer Guglielmo, Michelle Joffroy, Justin Leroy, Laura McTighe, Chinelo Okparanta, Cameron Rowland, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, C. Riley Snorton, and more.
Plus workshops with the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College, Librarians and Archivists for Palestine, the NYC Trans Oral History Project, Torn Apart/Separados, XFR, and more.
This year’s Scholar and Feminist conference builds on BCRW’s close collaboration with the Barnard College Archives to address the complex questions that circulate around the politics and ethics of archival work. Central to traditional scholarly work in reconstructing and interpreting the past, archives are perhaps even more crucial to the preservation of the stories and legacies of marginalized communities and political movements.
The S&F Conference will bring together archivists, librarians, artists, activists, and scholars to discuss the particular political and ethical challenges that reside in the project of creating archives for communities and social justice movements. How do we move beyond the notion of the archive as indifferent repository of textual, material, and digital materials and toward an archive of engagement? How can archival material be put to use to draw attention to muted histories and otherwise invisible networks of affiliation and connection? What difference do recent digital tools and capabilities make in the archiving and accessing of the past? How can archives empower communities to tell their own stories and offer others access to those stories without falling into the trap of appropriation? What political and ethical questions weigh most heavily on the contemporary work of the archive?
In addition to traditional keynotes and panels, the conference will feature workshops and exhibits to introduce participants to the wide array of work taking place among communities and their archivists at the current moment.
Registration is preferred but not required. Online registration will be open until the morning of the conference on Friday, February 8. Day-of registration will be available at the conference.
Please consider making a contribution with your registration. Your support makes our programming possible. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
The venue is accessible to people with mobility disabilities. Please contact BCRW for additional access needs.
Please join CSSD working group Reframing Gendered Violence for the final public workshop in this project, organized by Professor Kendall Thomas.
C. Riley Snorton
Asli Zengin
Sergio Suiama
Joss Taylor Greene
Catherine Clune-Taylor
Chinyere Ezie
Che Gossett
Christina B. Hanhardt
Chase Strangio
Videos from the workshop:
Day 1, Panel 1: Catherine Clune-Taylor & Asli Zengin, moderated by Jennifer Boylan
Day 2, Panel 1: Segio Suiama, Chinyere Ezie & Chase Strangio
Day 2, Panel 2: C. Riley Snorton & Christina B. Hanhardt, moderated by Kendall Thomas
Day 2, Panel 3: Joss Taylor Greene, moderated by Jack Halberstam
Subscribe to our youtube channel to watch more videos!
4:15-6pm: Catherine Clune-Taylor & Asli Zengin, moderated by Jennifer Boylan
10am: coffee
10:15am-11:30am: Sergio Suiama, Chinyere Ezie, & Chase Strangio
11:30-1pm: lunch break
1-2:30pm: C. Riley Snorton & Christina B. Hanhardt, moderated by Kendall Thomas
2:30-2:45pm: coffee
2:45-3:45pm: Joss Taylor Greene & Che Gossett, moderated by Jack Halberstam
Reception to follow
Free registration here (requested but not required)
Thank you to:
Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere working group at CSSD
Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Just Societies Initiative
Center for Gender & Sexuality Law
Society of Fellows & Heyman Center for the Humanities
Dean of Humanities
Graphisme: Guillaume Lavezzari - glavezzari.com
The Center for the Study of Social Difference working group Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere presents: Queer Studies: Here, There and Elsewhere conference at the Columbia Global Center in Paris, France.
This conference brings scholars together from France and the US to discuss queer theory, race, nation and immigration in Columbia’s Global Center in Paris. In the wake of a fierce “anti-gender” movement in Europe, queer theory has been characterized as a foreign import, as an American imperialism promoting ideas fundamentally antithetic to French political culture.
What fantasies of contagion and reproduction lie at the heart of this French (conservative) version of “queer theory” and what is the actual state of queer theory in the French academy today? The goal of this conference is to bring together French and American scholars to reflect on these questions, exchange ideas, and foster collaborations. In fact, in the US, scholars working under the banner of “queer theory” or “queer studies” comprise a wide-ranging group of thinkers with projects that range across numerous fields including disability studies, the politics of austerity, militarism and masculinity, urban planning, transgender surgeries in a global frame, queer diasporas, immigration, sex work, racial capitalism, state violence and so on. Most significantly perhaps, US based scholars have been vigorous in opposing the notion of a “global gay” or of a singular model of gender, sexuality and desire, and have even critiqued the cultural imperialism inherent in both the circulation of queer theories globally and the circulation of queer bodies within circuits of sexual tourism. Perhaps the most significant difference, moreover, between European based queer theory and US based queer studies has less to do with marriage and the family and more to do with race. Perhaps the most important version of queer theory that should travel to Europe, then, is the work of queer scholars studying race, ethnicity and migration. This conference facilitates exchanges between and across communities of scholars at a time of global political crisis.
10am – 10:30 am: Introductions
Arnaud Esquerre (IRIS - EHESS)
Jack Halberstam (Columbia University)
10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Panel one: Race and The Making of France
Moderator: Tina Campt (Barnard College)
Todd Shepard (Johns Hopkins University): “The ‘Arab Revolution’ and ‘Revolutionary Homosexuality’ in France’s Postalgerian 1970s”
Camille Robcis (Columbia University): “National Reproduction in the French Gay Marriage Debates”
Françoise Vergès (Collège d'études mondiales): “Race and the Making of France Yesterday and Today”
12pm to 2pm: LUNCH
2pm to 3:30pm
Panel two: Feminisms, Trans and Gender Theories
Moderator: Gil Hochberg (Columbia University)
Amélie Le Renard (CNRS, CMH): "A Feminist Postcolonial Approach of White Heteronormativity: Queer Perspectives on Structural Advantages and Distinction"
Emmanuel Beaubatie (IRIS - EHESS, Ined): "A Gender Perspective on Sex Change: The Effects of Sexism and Heteronormativity on Trans Individuals' Trajectories and Experiences in France"
Dominique Grisard (University of Basel, Switzerland), “Pink and Blue Gender Trap or Transgender Revolution? Entangled Discourses of Gender in Childhood Today”
4pm to 5:30pm
Panel three: Queer Cultural Production in an Age of Crisis
Moderator: Elizabeth Ladenson (Columbia University)
João Gabriell (Marseille): "Trans Revolutionary Politics in Neoliberal Times"
Damon Young (University of California, Berkeley): “Melodramas of Subjectivity (James Baldwin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ming Wong)”
Salima Amari (Cresppa, Université de Lausanne), "Lesbians from Maghrebian Immigration: Familial and Sexual Trouble"
Jack Halberstam (Columbia University): Conclusions
The Center for the Study of Social Difference working group Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence (RGFGV) cosponsors: Whose Feminism? Critical Perspectives on Gender and Security Policy.
Eighteen years after the passing of UN Resolution 1325 and the establishment of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, a critical examination of its usages and consequences on global governance institutions and security policy is in need. Join SIPA’s Gender Policy Working Group for a panel discussion on the consequences of 1325, securofeminism and how gender discourse is employed to different political agendas.
Panelists:
Lila Abu-Lughod
Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University
Director of Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence (RGFGV)
Author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (2013)
Nimmi Gowrinathan
Director of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative
Visiting Research Professor at the Colin Powell Center for Global and Civic Leadership at City College New York
Author of Radicalizing Her (Forthcoming, 2018) and Emissaries of Empowerment (2017)
Rafia Zakaria
Media Fellow/Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence (RGFGV)
Attorney
Author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate Story of Pakistan (2015) and Emissaries of Empowerment (2017)
Additional support provided by: Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, SIPA's Gender and Public Policy Specialization, Women in Peace and Security Working Group (WIPS), Middle East and North Africa Forum (MENA), Conflict Resolution Working Group (CRWG), UN Studies Working Group (UNSWG)
Click here to watch video from the workshop.
A Workshop Featuring:
Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron, Vice-President, Global Biological Policy & Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative
Jennifer Nuzzo, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security Associate Editor, Health Security
Andrew Weber, Senior Fellow, Council on Strategic Risks, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs
From Columbia University:
W. Ian Lipkin, Lawrence Stanberry, Philip Larussa, Jennifer Dohrn, Kathleen Pike, Yanis Ben Amor
Space is Limited: RSVP to Noel Manu at nm3091@cumc.columbia.edu
Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, due out this fall, is the result of years of work by a collective of scholars from the UK, the US, and elsewhere. Working on the basis of Raymond Williams' 1976 classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the new volume extends and updates 40 of the original entries and adds 85 more short essays on the twists and turns, emphases and omissions, contests and usages: love along with network, truth along with youth, democracy along with violence. This afternoon event features the volume's two head editors, Colin MacCabe and Holly Yanacek, as well as two members of the editorial collective, Jonathan Arac and Arjuna Parakrama.
Commentators will include several New York scholars: political theorist Susan Buck-Morss, anthropologist Miriam Ticktin, and literary scholar Emily Apter, co-editor of the monumental Dictionary of Untranslatables. The event also brings the Keywords Project into dialogue with representatives of a kindred and ongoing project housed in part at Columbia: Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. The flavor of its work can be tasted by some of the concepts posted thus far: agency and animals, archive and authority, blood and bubbles. Political Concepts speakers will include Etienne Balibar, Akeel Bilgrami, Stathis Gourgouris, and Ann Stoler.
The format of the event asks speakers from each project to direct comments to the project of the others. All are welcome as far as space permits.
Schedule:
2:30 Introduction: Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
2:45-4:00 PM: The Keywords Project
Moderator: Miriam Ticktin, Anthropology, The New School
Colin MacCabe, University of Pittsburgh
Holly Yanacek, James Madison University
Arjuna Parakrama, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
Response: [from the Political Concepts team] Emily Apter, New York University
4:00 to 4:15 Coffee Break
4:15-5:30 PM: The Political Concepts Project
Moderator: Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University
Ann Stoler, The New School
Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University
Etienne Balibar, Columbia University and the University of Paris
Response: [from the Keywords team]: Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh
5:30 -6:30 PM: Final Roundtable
Susan Buck-Morss, City University of New York
Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University
Arjuna Parakrama, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka
Emily Apter, New York University
Holly Yanacek, James Madison University
Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh
Colin MacCabe, University of Pittsburgh
This event is co-sponsored by The Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) as part of our Keywords project. Additional sponsorship by: The Heyman Center, University Seminars, The Department of English and Comparative Literature, The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and The Office of the Dean of Humanities.
The Reframing Gendered Violence project at the Center for the Study of Social Difference is proud to co-sponsor a talk organized by our affiliate the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality:
“Portraiture and Enslavement at the Thresholds of Emancipation (A Caribbean Meditation)”
(in conjunction with the Posing Modernity exhibit at Columbia’s Wallach Gallery)
This talk will address the only two extant oil portraits of enslaved women produced during the periods of emancipation in the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. By underscoring the conflictive political and ideological forces, affective dynamics, and aesthetic principles at work in their composition, it will focus on the conditions that made possible the visual configuration of black people as subjects of freedom and on its problematic re-articulation of the boundaries between the human and the animal.
Organized by the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and co-sponsored by: Maison Française, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Barnard Art History, Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference: Reframing Gender Violence Project, The Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Department of Anthropology, and Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures.
Roxane Gay and Katia D. Ulysse will discuss issues including the Caribbean and its diaspora, method, feminism, and gender in their work.
CSSD working group Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture presents "Epigenetics, Precision Medicine, and Responsibility Towards Children. What Can We Learn From Neurodevelopmental Disorders?" a talk by Dr. Kristien Hens
Abstract:
In the second half of the twentieth century, there was a prevailing hope that the increasing knowledge of genomics would lead to major breakthroughs in drug development and personalized medicine. Since the beginning of the 21st century, however, it has become apparent that many of these expectations were based on a naïve view on what genes actually do. Recent discoveries in the field of epigenetics suggest a more dynamic concept of human nature and human diseases and disorders. In this talk I will first analyze the ethical consequences of these new findings. What does it mean, if anything, that environmental and psychosocial factors resonate on a molecular level and may be passed on to future generations? Second, I will discuss what this implies for individual and collective responsibility towards children. Finally, I will use my own research on neurodevelopmental disorders to demonstrate that the additional complexity yielded by these new findings also opens up opportunities for a nuanced view on children’s health and well-being.
