Banu Karaca in The New York Times

Banu Karaca, a member of CSSD working group Women Mobilizing Memory, was quoted in a recent New York Times article about creeping censorship amid the current flourishing of the arts in Turkey.  

Karaca is a founder of Siyah Bant, an organization that monitors arts censorship in Turkey.  

Read the New York Times article here.

CONFERENCE REPORT: 2014 Caribbean Digital Conference

The Digital Black Atlantic Project closed the fall of 2014 with an unprecedented event, its inaugural Caribbean Digital conference.  

On December 4th and 5th, professors, artists, graduate students, activists and administrators explored the dimensions of digital expression and its implications on the Caribbean and its diaspora. Panelists from across the globe joined a conversation at Barnard College in person, on Skype, and via Livestream, sharing theories and cautionary tales about various approaches to building projects and creating community in an increasingly digital academic environment. With a focus on the Caribbean and its diaspora, the conference offered fertile ground for analyzing the intersection of information technologies with fields such as American studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, black studies, ethnomusicology, and communications, among others.

The conference showcased radical approaches to the archive throughout its seven panels. Researchers and educators of color were a strong presence at Caribbean Digital, contributing in important ways to the breadth of topics that inform the critical discipline that is the digital humanities. The panel discussions were preceded by the Kamau Brathwaite researchathon held on Thursday morning and afternoon. This singular event—kicking off the ongoing the collaborative constitution of an open-access, online bibliography of work by and on Caribbean intellectual Brathwaite—generated over 500 bibliographic contributions in just six hours.

With the help of Twitter hashtag #sxcd2014 and the conference website, extensive social media activity gave enormous reach to the two-day event. Questions fielded from Twitter kept the conversations fresh and helped to archive what is planned to be the first of many conferences concerning archipelagic formations of digital networks and/in the Caribbean. David Scott, anthropology professor at Columbia and founder of the Small Axe print journal, closed the conference with a provocative reflection on the futures of publishing.

 

The event's primary organizers were Kaiama L. Glover, associate professor of French and Africana studies at Barnard, Kelly Baker Josephs, associate professor of English at York College, CUNY, and Alex Gil, digital scholarship coordinator and affiliate faculty in English and comparative studies at Columbia. Generously supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia, along with the Barnard Africana Studies Department and Barnard's Committee for Online and On-Campus Learning (COOL), the conference drew a sizeable audience from within the campus community in addition to drawing participants from around the tri-state area and, of course, cyberspace.

PUBLICATION: Yarimar Bonilla on "#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States"

Yarimar Bonilla of the Digital Black Atlantic Working Group and Jonathan Rosa have published "#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States" in the January 2015 issue of the American Ethnologist.

As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, Bonilla and Rosa discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. The piece demonstrates how engaging in “hashtag activism” can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, examines how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Their analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in “hashtag ethnography.”

Read it here.

Lila Abu-Lughod's new book named "Best Book of 2014 on the Middle East"

Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press) was named a "Best Book of 2014 on the Middle East" by Foreign Affairs.   

Abu-Lughod is Co-director of the CSSD project Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies.  

Read John Waterbury's review here.  Listen to Abu-Lughod discuss her work here.

Christian Lammert on "Welfare and Citizenship: The Pillars of Social Cohesion"

PUBLIC LECTURE:

Wednesday, November 5th, 5pm in 754 Schermerhorn Extension.

Christian Lammert, Professor for North American Politics at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin, will speak about the relationship between welfare and democracy—a question central to contemporary transatlantic debates surrounding capitalism, austerity, and inequality.

Over the course of the twentieth century in the United States and Europe, the social bargaining process we call welfare integrated capital and labor in ways that had a profound impact on political participation and legitimacy. Examining social policy and citizenship in a comparative framework, Christian Lammert, Professor for North American Politics at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin, will speak to the relationship between welfare and democracy—a question central to contemporary transatlantic debates surrounding capitalism, austerity, and inequality.  Please join us in 754 Schermerhorn Extension on November 5th at 5PM for an enlightening lecture on this topic.

 

Wednesday, November 5, 2014 - 5:00pm

754 Schermerhorn Extension