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.

Friday December 7:

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.

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.

CSSD working group Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy presents:

Caribbean Syllabus: Second Edition

and

Max Haiven's Art After Money, Money After Art Book Launch

with: Tao Goffe, Monica Jiménez, Sarah Muir, Frances Negron-Muntaner, and Jason Wozniak

About Max Haiven:

Max Haiven is assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media, and Social Justice at Lakehead University and director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab.  

About Caribbean Syllabus:

In May of 2018, the Unpayable Debt working group, a project of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, released the first edition of Caribbean Syllabus, Life and Debt in the Caribbean. The most comprehensive available public resource on the topic, the syllabus stimulated considerable conversation among scholars, journalists, artists, activists and others in the Caribbean and across the world.

As a result of those discussions, the Unpayable Debt working group created a second edition of Caribbean Syllabus with three new sections created by innovative young scholars, on indenture, law, and education. In an effort to widen the conversation, the present edition also contains translations of key syllabus sections to other important languages in the Caribbean, including Spanish, French and Dutch.

Caribbean Syllabus is the second in a series of three syllabi that the Unpayable Debt Working Group is producing. The first was the Puerto Rico Syllabus, published in 2017 and focusing on the Puerto Rican debt crisis. The last syllabus will consider debt regimes in a global context and will be released in 2019.