Mona Sinha Directs Documentary on Trans Representation in Hollywood
The documentary, “Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen,” can be streamed on Netflix.
CSSD Women Creating Change Leadership Council (WCCLC) Member Mona Sinha’s feature documentary, “Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen,” was released on January 27th. “Disclosure” is an “unprecedented, eye-opening look at transgender depictions in film and television, revealing how Hollywood simultaneously reflects and manufactures our deepest anxieties about gender.”
To learn more about the documentary, read here.
Hear commentary from Mona about her documentary and trans representation here.
To learn more about WCCLC, read here.
Three New Working Groups at CSSD Launching Fall 2020
Black Atlantic Ecologies, Insurgent Domesticities, and Motherhood and Technology working groups to launch this year.
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
Upcoming Event Cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Social Difference
Art in Our Moment will be taking place Thursday, July 9, 2020. Email irwgs@columbia.edu to rsvp.
Mona Sinha Joins Forces with Gloria Steinem in Letter Responding to Trump’s New Rule on Transgender Rights
This piece was published by The New York Times on June 15, 2020.
CSSD Women Creating Change Leadership Council (WCCLC) member Mona Sinha’s op-ed, “Trump and Transgender Rights,” was published by The New York Times as a response to their news article, “White House Eliminates Transgender Civil Rights Protections in Medical Care.” Mona and co-author Gloria Steinem condemn the administration’s decision on transgender rights, asserting that it “erases trans people’s civil right to health care.”
For the full letter, read here.
To read more about WCCLC, read here.
Menstrual Health and Gender Justice Fellow Marni Sommer Co-Authors Article for Devex
The opinion piece is titled “Creating a more equal post Covid-19 world for people who menstruate.”
Marni Sommer, Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and Menstrual Health and Gender Justice working group fellow, recently co-wrote an opinion piece for Devex titled “Creating a more equal post Covid-19 world for people who menstruate.” Fellow co-authors of the piece include Virginia Kamowa and Therese Mahon.
Click here to read the full article.
On the Frontlines Coordinator Receives Award from the School of General Studies
Jeremy Orloff won the Change Agent Award at the first-ever Academic Prizes and Student Leadership Awards Virtual Ceremony.
Jeremy Orloff, postbac premed student at the School of General Studies and coordinator for the On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics working group, received the Change Agent Award at the first-ever Academic Prizes and Student Leadership Awards Virtual Ceremony, held Tuesday, May 19, 2020.
Click here for a list of all awards and recipients and to watch the award ceremony.
Jennifer Dohrn Leads Discussion on the Public Health Crisis of Police Violence Against Black Americans
Professor Dohrn’s 208 person class held signs in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Jennifer Dohrn, co-director of the On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics working group and Associate Professor at Columbia Nursing, held a discussion with her Global Health Equity and the Responsibility of the Nursing Profession class on the public health crisis of police violence against Black Americans on #BlackOutTuesday, June 2, 2020. The 208 students also made signs in to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
A picture of the students and their signs can be viewed here.
Vicky Murillo Interviewed on CNN en Español
The Environmental Justice working group co-director discusses the protests following the death of George Floyd and President Trump's response.
Vicky Murillo, co-director of the Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean and Director of Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS), discussed her views on the recent protests that followed the death of George Floyd as well as President Donald Trump’s response. Professor Murillo also addressed the country’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic and how all of this will affect the presidential election.
To view the interview click here.
On the Frontlines Co-Director to Teach New Week-long ISERP Course
Wilmot James will co-lead Executive Education in the Social Sciences, a new course on pandemics.
Wilmot G. James, Visiting Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and co-director of the On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics working group will lead a new course on pandemics from the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP). This week-long course beginning June 8th, 2020, will also be led by Lawrence R. Stanberry of Columbia University, and feature speakers from the health, private/commercial and government sectors.
Full details on the course and information on registration can be found here.
Register here.
Farah Griffin Pens Piece for the Boston Review
Professor Griffin’s forum response is titled “Teaching African American Literature During Covid-19.”
Farah Griffin, Chair of African-American & African Diaspora Studies and former co-director of the Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women working group, recently published a forum response in the Boston Review. In her piece, entitled “Teaching African American Literature During Covid-19,” Professor Griffin reflects on the effects of the current pandemic on her classroom and how it has changed her Introduction to African American Literature course.