RGFGV announces second Media Fellowship Competition

CSSD Project Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence announces its second Media Fellowship Competition. The second of two reporting grants hosted by the project, this cycle will focus on South Asia. Previous Media Fellows were: Yasmin el Rifae, Nafeesa Syeed, and Samira Shackle.

The full announcement is available here.

Co-Director of CSSD project Social Justice After the Welfare State, Alice Kessler-Harris, is featured in a NYTimes article

Alice Kessler-Harris is featured in a NYTimes article on workplace power dynamics and the slow progress for women in traditionally 'masculine' fields.

Kessler-Harris discusses the problems with characterizing certain jobs as ‘manly’ and the negative implications these have for women employed in these sectors.

Click here to read the article.

Alice Kessler-Harris is a co-director of CSSD project Social Justice after the Welfare State. She is also co-editor of the book “Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity,”

CSSD is hosting a book launch event for Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity on April 4, 2018.

Blog Post Now Available for CSSD Precision Medicine Event The Genomic Revolution, Genetics Counselors, and “Doing Ethics”

On January 22, CSSD/PM&S project Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture welcomed Dr. Susan Markens (CUNY-Lehman College) for its first talk of the semester, titled The Genomic Revolution, Genetics Counselors, and Doing Ethics.

Dr. Markens' talk presented data primarily derived from forty-two qualitative interviews and was based on her research about the perspectives of genetic counselors towards the increasing availability and use of genetic science and testing.

The Precision Medicine lecture series represents a broad-based exploration of questions that precision medicine raises in law, ethics, the social sciences, economics, and the humanities.

Click here to read more about Dr. Markens talk on ethics and genetic counseling.

Essay Conceived in IRWGS seminar inspired by CSSD Project is Published in the New York Times Modern Love Column

Columbia University senior Bindu Bansinath wrote the first version of the newest Modern Love essay in the IRWGS undergraduate seminar Narrating Rape, taught by CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch.

Bansinath's essay “How ‘Lolita’ Freed Me From My Own Humbert” has been published today online and will be in this Sunday's print version of the New York Times as part of their popular Modern Love essay series. Her essay tells the story of a young woman’s struggle with abuse and her journey to reclaim her voice.

The Narrating Rape course is one of the outcomes of the Reframing Gendered Violence project at CSSD, part of the Women Creating Change initiative.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Delivers Keynote Lecture at Dhaka Art Summit

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, recently delivered the keynote lecture at the 2018 Dhaka Art Summit. Professor Spivak’s keynote address “addressed the precarious situation of the Rohingya people in relation to Indigeneity in the world today, with a special emphasis on the languages of the Bengal region.”

Professor Spivak’s keynote lecture received news coverage in the Dhaka Tribune, and is available to watch online in full here.  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Kenya and Ghana, Statistics and Stories. Spivak is also University Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and a founding member of CSSD affiliate the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.  

CSSD project Gender & The Global Slum featured at the inaugural “She Opened The Door” Conference

CSSD executive committee members Anupama Rao and Ana Paulina Lee presented research from the CSSD working group Gender and the Global Slum at the inaugural She Opened the Door: Columbia University Women's Conference.

On February 9-11, 2018, more than 1,000 alumni and students convened at She Opened the Door for a weekend of celebrating, learning from, and expanding horizons with fellow Columbia alumnae who are making a difference in our world.

Rao and Lee were among a distinguished group of faculty from Columbia and Barnard to present fascinating, new research in TED-type talks and describe how their findings can impact women in various key ways. Their talk discussed how women in international urban slums address the urgent problems of poverty and social exclusion.

Notable Columbia alumnae speakers at the conference included Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59LAW, Poppy Harlow ‘05CC, Abigail Disney ’87, ‘94GSAS, A’Lelia Bundles ’76JRN, Claire Shipman ‘86CC, ‘94SIPA, and more.

“She Opened the Door” is a tribute to Winifred Edgerton Merrill. She was the first woman to receive a degree from Columbia University, opening the door for women to gain admission to Columbia's graduate and professional Schools at a time when co-education for women was under heavy debate.

CSSD project Gender & the Global Slum looks at the social hazards of urban informality and its disproportionate effects on women.

Click here to watch the conversation with Justice Ginsburg.

Anupama Rao and Ana Paulina Lee at the conference

Alice Kessler-Harris named to the Board of Governors of the Edward M. Kennedy Prize

CSSD Project Co-Director Alice Kessler-Harris has been named to the Board of Governors of the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History. The prize, established in honor of the late senator, awards $100,000 to “a new play or musical that enlists theater’s power to explore the past of the United States, to participate meaningfully in the great issues of our day through public conversation, grounded in historical understanding.”  Kessler-Harris joins fellow CSSD Project Co-Director Jean Howard on the Board of Governors.

Kessler-Harris was Co-Director of CSSD Project Social Justice After the Welfare State, and is both R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History and Professor Emerita at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. CSSD eagerly looks forward to hosting a panel, “Democracy After the Welfare State”,  in honor of the publication of Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity, edited by Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna.

Jack Halberstam comments on RuPaul’s Drag Race in The New York Times Magazine

CSSD Project Director Jack Halberstam spoke with New York Times staff writer Jenna Wortham for  “Is RuPaul’s Drag Race the Most Radical Show on TV?”, published in the January 28th, 2018 edition of The New York Times Magazine.

Halberstam spoke about issues of gender, representation, and power dynamics in RuPaul’s Drag Race, pointing out that “there’s no ‘RuPaul’s Drag Kings...we still have this idea that femininity is malleable, and masculinity is a protected domain of real power and privilege. It is not transferable or attainable. The public has no appetite for artificial masculinity.”

Halberstam is the Project Director of CSSD’s Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere, a working group created to “discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame.” Halberstam is also Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

New Yorker article about the work of Jennifer Hirsch on the SHIFT project at Columbia

Jia Tolentino has published an article entitled "Safer Spaces" in the February 12 & 19, 2018 print issue of New Yorker magazine. In this article, Tolentino highlights the work of Jennifer Hirsch, co-director of CSSD project Reframing Gendered Violence (RGV), on the SHIFT program at Columbia. SHIFT is a comprehensive research project that examines the many factors that shape sexual health and sexual violence for undergrads at Columbia.

You can read the full New Yorker article online here.

In October 2017, Professor Hirsch convened a panel discussion called Beyond Prevalence: The Next Generation of Research on Campus Sexual Assault, as part of the RGV project at CSSD. A video of that event can be found on the CSSD YouTube channel here.

RGFGV Media Fellows Yasmin El-Rifae and Samira Shackle Publish Articles on TheNation.com and ProspectMagazine.co.uk

CSSD Project Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence held an international competition and selected three Media Fellows to receive reporting grants. They joined the project, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, and did research in the Middle East to produce innovative media stories.

Yasmin El-Rifae describes her experience with a volunteer feminist group resisting sexual violence that formed during the Egyptian Revolution. Her article ‘What the Egyptian Revolution Can Offer #MeToo’, highlights the way Egyptian activists are using self-organized, direct, and offensive tactics to fight sexual violence. In this era of the #MeToo movement, El-Rifae urges her readers to move towards a feminist praxis that creates global and systemic change and to look to Egyptian feminists for direction.

In her article ‘The Bureaucracy of Isis’, Samira Shackle looks at the dilemmas involved in the quest for restorative justice in Mosul post-ISIS. Focusing on the experience of refugee women, she reframes dominant narratives about religion and gender-based violence. Shackle’s interviews with family members of ISIS collaborators and victims of ISIS violence uncover how women suffer violence at the hands of family, the state, and ultimately how much human suffering has been created by imperialist interventions in Iraq.