Professor Jack Halberstam receives honorary doctorate

Jack Halberstam, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English at Columbia University, and Director of the CSSD working group Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden for his work on the fluid boundaries of gender in society. Professor Halberstam accepted the honorary doctorate in a ceremony on May 25, 2018. More information available here.

Queer Theory: Here, There, and Everywhere is a CSSD working group to discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame.

CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch to speak at Columbia Global Center in Chile

CSSD Director and William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Marianne Hirsch, will be speaking at the Columbia University Global Center in Santiago, Chile on the 31st of May as part of a symposium entitled El Futuro del Pasado (The Future of the Past), in a discussion about school portraits in difficult times.

During Professor Hirsch’s time with CSSD, she has served as co-director of several working groups including, Reframing Gendered Violence, Women Mobilizing Memory and Engendering the Archive.

New Caribbean Syllabus from Unpayable Debt working group

CSSD working group “Unpayable Debt” has just published the first ever digital resource to study debt and the Caribbean, "Caribbean Syllabus: Life and Debt in the Caribbean." Frances Negron-Muntaner and Sarah Muir, co-directors of the Unpayable Debt working group, have contributed to the syllabus, as have many participants in the recent Frontiers of Debt conference organized by the working group.

Pedagogies of Dignity working group director awarded fellowship

Christia Mercer is Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and Project Director of the new CSSD working group, Pedagogies of Dignity. She has been awarded a fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for her project “Feeling the Way to Truth: Women, Reason, and the Development of Modern Philosophy. ” She will be the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow for 2018-19.

Kellie Jones Receives Honorary Degree from Amherst College

Kellie Jones, member of the working group Engendering the Archive and Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from her alma mater Amherst College to recognize her leadership in the field of Art History.  

She has also been awarded the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award following the publication of her latest book, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s.

Congratulations to CSSD graduate fellows and assistants on defending their dissertations

Congratulations to the following Ph.D. candidates who have defended their dissertations and received their Ph.D.s this year! All of these students have been invaluable members of working groups at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, as graduate fellows or graduate assistants:

From the Women Mobilizing Memory working group:

Nicole Gervasio (English)

Andrew Crow (English)

Alyssa Greene (German)

From the Social Justice After the Welfare State working group:

Anna Halperin (History)

George Aumoithe (History)

From the Pacific Climate Circuits working group:

Patrick Nason (Anthropology)

New working groups at CSSD launching AY2018-19

CSSD launches six new projects for the 2018-19 academic year. The projects will address gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of inequality to foster ethical and progressive social change.

Racial Capitalism: This working group theorizes the connections between exploitation and expropriation in interlinked political geographies. The Racial Capitalism working group will build on and also expand already existing efforts of the Barnard New Directions in American Studies (NDAS) initiative.
Project Directors: Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, and Manu Vimalassery

On The Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics: The working group On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics seeks to understand the role of nurses as change agents in the prevention, detection and response to pandemic infectious disease outbreaks.
Project Directors: Jennifer Dohrn, Wilmot James, Steve Nicholas, Victoria Rosner

Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City: Geographies of Injustice is a working group of interdisciplinary scholars who are interested in asking how spatial politics intersects with inequality and social difference (race, caste, and ethnicity).
Project Directors: Anupama Rao, Ana Paulina Lee

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice: The Menstrual Health and Gender Justice working group seeks to further the nascent field of menstrual studies. This group puts particular emphasis on critically evaluating the current state of research and how interdisciplinary collaboration might help remedy some of these gaps.
Project Director: Inga Winkler

Pedagogies of Dignity: Pedagogies of Dignity is an interdisciplinary initiative that brings together formerly incarcerated people, activists, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Project Director: Christia Mercer

Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere: Queer Theory: Here, There, and Everywhere is a CSSD working group to discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame.
Project Director: Jack Halberstam

Women Creating Change Leadership Council meets for the second time

The Women Creating Change Leadership Council met for the second time in New York on April 12, 2018. Professors Anupama Rao and Ana Paulina Lee presented on their work on the Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City project.  Lila Abu-Lughod presented on her work on the Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence project. Marianne Hirsch discussed new CSSD projects which will launch in 2018 and 2019. Bindu Bansinath, a student in a course inspired by WCC called “Narrating Rape,” spoke about her published essay in the New York times.   

Participants included:

Ann Kaplan
Annette Anthony
Lisa Carnoy
Isobel Coleman
Deborah Jackson
Safwan Masri
Molly Mathews Multedo
Cynthia Moses-Manocherian
Alyson Neel
Philippa Portnoy        
Marianne Hirsch
Meera Ananth
Carolyn Ferguson
Lila Abu-Lughod
Catherine LaSota
Ana Paulina Lee
Anupama Rao
Bindu Bansinath
S. Mona Sinha
Selena Soo
A’lelia Bundles
Esta Stecher
Melissa Fisher                           
Amal Ghandour                        
Jacki Zehner
Davia Temin  

The Women Creating Change Leadership Council is comprised of individuals who are committed to the exploration of issues which affect women and the ways in which women address global gender challenges. The mission of the Council is to promote interdisciplinary collaborative research and to sponsor events that publicize this important work.   

Democracy and The Welfare State: The Two Wests In The Age of Austerity will be presented at the Columbia Global Centers - Paris

Columbia Global Centers - Paris, in partnership with Columbia University Press  and Centre d'histoire de Sciences Po will host a book presentation for Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity, edited by CSSD project director Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna. 

Alice Kessler-Harris is project director for CSSD working group Social Justice After the Welfare State. The research of CSSD working group Social Justice After the Welfare State inspired the creation of this book.

The book presentation will be held at the Columbia Global Centers - Paris
4,Rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris, France.

CSSD project director Inga Winkler receives grant to support her work on menstrual health

Professor Inga Winkler, co-director of the new CSSD project, Menstrual Health and Gender Justice, receives a grant to support her work on menstrual health.

The grant from the UN Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council will support research and advocacy on menstrual health, including the development of a handbook on Critical Menstrual Studies, which Professor Winkler is co-editing. The handbook seeks to compile state of the art research in the burgeoning field of menstrual health and to inform and shape rapidly evolving developments in policy and practice, as well as elevate ongoing national policy developments in countries across the globe to the level of the UN through various advocacy initiatives.

The last several years have brought a tremendous diversity of menstrual­ positive expressions—from the artistic to the practical, the serious to the playful, the provocative to the educational, and the local to the global.

Speaking on the upsurge in interests on menstrual health, Professor Winkler explains: “I see a need – and indeed a responsibility – to engage and ask critical questions."

Professor Saidiya Hartman Awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship

CSSD project director Saidiya Hartman has been awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Professor Hartman will spend the fellowship year completing Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (forthcoming Norton), which examines the social upheaval and radical transformation of everyday life that took place in the emergent black ghetto in the early decades of the 20th century.

Saidiya Hartman is co-director for CSSD projects Gender and the Global Slum and Engendering the Archive. 

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

Engendering the Archive explores how power determines what is conserved and what is lost, which stories have been committed to collective memory and which ones have been erased.