RGFGV Media Fellow Nafeesa Syeed Publishes Article on Bloomberg.com

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.

Nafeesa Syeed focuses on the struggles and achievements of Yemeni women in the midst of US and Saudi-led war campaigns. Through interviews with Djibouti-based Yemeni women living in refugee camps and active young Yemeni women in Amman, Jordan, she shows how women are framing their experiences of violence and war and assessing their changing social roles. Her article ‘Women Flee a Hellscape in Yemen. Here are Their Lives Now’, highlights the way refugee women are using entrepreneurship to adapt to their new realities.

Marianne Hirsch delivers keynote address at Memory Studies Association Conference

CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch delivered the keynote address at the second annual Memory Studies Association Conference, December 15, 2017.

Hirsch’s address, “Stateless Memories”, further develops her pioneering work in the field of memory studies, calling into question the ethnocentrism of dominant memory cultures and looking instead for progressive ways of developing collective memories outside the bounds of national monuments.

Marianne Hirsch is Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, as well as William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is co-director of the CSSD projects Women Mobilizing Memory, Engendering the Archive, and Reframing Gendered Violence.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delivers inaugural lecture for International Colloquium on Creative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

CSSD project co-director Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delivered the inaugural lecture at the International Colloquium on Creative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, at Sullamussalam Science College, December 12, 2017.

Spivak’s address, which was followed by a panel discussion, “Spivak with Alternative Educators”, argued that “higher education means flexibility of imagination,” encouraging university students and faculty alike to pursue global research that extends beyond the university itself. The address is available to watch online, and further coverage is available at The Hindu.

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.

RGFGV Media Fellow Samira Shackle Publishes Three Articles

CSSD’s Project on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence awarded reporting grants to three Media Fellows who joined the project in September. After participating in an international workshop with scholars and activists hosted at the Columbia Global Center in Amman, they traveled in the Middle East to research stories that could reframe understandings of the relationship between gender violence and religion.

Samira Shackle published three articles on refugee women’s active responses to gender-based violence and poverty in Iraq and Lebanon.

Yazidis in Iraq: 'The genocide is ongoing'

The Refugee Whose Husband Sold Her Into Sex Slavery

Hairdressing, sewing, cooking – is this really how we're going to empower women?

Frances Negrón-Muntaner Interviewed by EuropeNow

Frances Negrón-Muntaner was interviewed by EuropeNow as part of their special feature on Diversity, Security, Mobility: Challenges for Eastern Europe.

In the interview, Negrón-Muntaner discusses her interest in creating archives, especially for marginalized groups, as sources for community building, collective memory, and the production of new knowledge and complex stories. She also details her work creating an archive in the digital space and discusses her contribution to the Roma Peoples Project, an initiative that spotlights Roma peoples and expands Roma studies.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is co-director for the CSSD project Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, And The New Global Economy.

Judith Butler and Başak Ertür write for The Guardian about situation in Turkey

Judith Butler and and Başak Ertür, fellows in the CSSD project Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change, have written an opinion for The Guardian in support of those who signed the Academics for Peace position in Turkey in January 2016. Trials of these signatories began last week in Istanbul. Read the article here:

"In Turkey, academics asking for peace are accused of terrorism"

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Receives Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award from MLA

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has awarded Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and a founding member of CSSD affiliate the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the eighth MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. Professor Spivak is a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) and a co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Kenya and Ghana, Statistics and Stories.

The MLA Executive Council selected Spivak for the award on the recommendation of the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Review Committee and the Committee on Honors and Awards. Having first attracted acclaim for her translation of and magisterial preface to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) and her landmark article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1983), Spivak has influenced postcolonial studies, international feminism, postructuralist philosophies, critiques of globalization, as well as art and curatorial practices. She is also an activist in feminist and ecological social movements and rural education. In addition to receiving numerous honorary degrees, she has been awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy and the Padma Bhushan, given by the Indian government. The Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement will be presented to Spivak during the MLA Awards Ceremony at the January 2018 convention.

Read the award announcement on MLA Commons here.

Columbia University faculty sign a statement to the Turkish government to free Osman Kavala

Columbia University faculty, including CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch, urge the Turkish government to free Osman Kavala immediately and to drop all charges against him.

Read the full statement here, on osmankavala.org