Professor Marisa Solomon Explores the Correlation Between Proximity to Waste and Fugitive Gender Articulations in Recent Research Publication

On October 1, 2022, Marisa Solomon, co-director of the Black Atlantic Ecologies working group and assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies, shared her recent scholarly work in GLQ (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies). Entitled "Ecologies Elsewhere: Flyness, Fill, and Black Women's Fugitive Matter(s)," the article delves beyond conventional environmental perspectives, focusing on spaces where existence is intricately tied to waste in various forms.

Emerging from a broader investigation into the anti-Black geographies of "long-distance" waste management, Solomon argues that waste infrastructure upholds the value of white properties while simultaneously creating marginalized spaces of Black dispossession. Through her analysis, she contends that acts such as stealing, salvaging, narrating, and laboring with waste serve as critiques of how property organizes the world. These practices, she posits, are ecological strategies developed outside conventional frameworks.

Vanessa Agard-Jones Lectures on Ephemera at Wesleyan University

Assistant Professor Vanessa Agard-Jones gave a lecture on “Empirical Ephemera” at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities. She explored the ways that colonality is made material, and how we might use sand as a tool for thinking an ephemeral archive, empirically. 

Agard-Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia, co-director of CSSD’s Black Atlantic Ecologies working group, and member of the Queer Aqui and former Reframing Gendered Violence and Science and Social Difference working groups.

Black Atlantic Ecologies Graduate Assistant featured in Columbia News for Co-Creation of New Podcast

Alyssa James, graduate assistant of the Black Atlantic Ecologies working group, was featured in Columbia News in the Q&A, Anthropology Students’ Podcast Is a Response to Protests and the Pandemic, in which she and her co-host Brendane Tynes discuss the inspiration behind the creation of their new podcast, “Zora’s Daughters.” 

To learn more about Zora’s Daughters read here. 
To listen to the Zora’s Daughters podcast click here.
To learn more about Black Atlantic Ecologies, read here. 

Co-Director of the Black Atlantic Ecologies Working Group Interviewed by Wave Hill

 Vanessa Agard Jones, co-director of Black Atlantic Ecologies,  spoke with Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin and Eileen Jeng Lynch at Wave Hill about a variety of topics including queer ecologies, fugitivity, toxicity, and decoloniality.  Professor Jones reflected on Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin’s Sunroom Project Space exhibition M for Membrane, which explores the membrane, mystery, and magic of microbial forms, fungi, and indigenous mold.

Three New Working Groups at CSSD Launching Fall 2020

Three new working groups, coming from a highly competitive selection process, will be launching at the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) in the 2020-2021 academic year. CSSD projects address gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of inequality to foster ethical and progressive social change.

Black Atlantic Ecologies

The Black Atlantic Ecologies group supports and elaborates scholarship that centers the enduring effects of coloniality and the dynamic power of protest in African diasporic confrontations with environmental crisis. Taking as their provocation the refiguring of human and nonhuman ecologies occasioned by the transatlantic slave trade, the Black Atlantic Ecologies working group seeks to understand what Nadia Ellis has called, riffing on José Muñoz, “the queer work of raced survival” as they come to grips with contemporary dimensions of anthropogenic climate change. As inspiration for the work that they undertake, they ask after visions for survival and justice that are grounded in Black queer, Black feminist, and antiracist responses to the subjugation of the earth as well as to human and nonhuman cotravelers. 
This group is supported via CSSD’s partnership with Columbia’s Earth Institute.

Project Directors:

Vanessa Agard-Jones Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Marisa Solomon Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College

Insurgent Domesticities 

Insurgent Domesticities is a platform that interrogates the politics of ‘home’ through histories of solidarity, disobedience, stealth, and militancy, from the scale of the clothesline to that of the state. These bring into view the fine-grained intricacies and intimacies of ‘home’ as constituted through insurgent objects and practices. The Insurgent Domesticities working group seeks liberatory historiographical approaches existing within and between territories and institutions, within the present worldwide protectionist climate, in which ‘home’ is still a fiercely pursued, maintained, and guarded space. 

Project Director:

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, and affiliated faculty, Department of Art History, Barnard College, Columbia University

Motherhood and Technology

Utilizing interdisciplinary membership, this CSSD working group will engage in a global examination of how medical technologies have changed and have been changed by the experience of motherhood. In particular, the Motherhood and Technology working group will  explore some of the problems and dilemmas within the following areas, among others: rapid advances in cryogenics, surrogacy as a mainstream technology, the circulation of new genomic techniques worldwide, and advanced reproductive technologies (ART). In exploring these issues, the Motherhood and Technology working group is guided by the interdisciplinary approach of the medical humanities. 

Project Directors:

Rishi Goyal Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine; Director, Medicine, Literature and Society, Columbia University
Arden Hegele Medical Humanities Fellow, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities; Lecturer, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University