The Extractive Media Working Group has released its Spring 2024 Events Flyer listing its upcoming programming for the semester.
Follow this link to see upcoming events at CSSD.
SOF/Heyman Center to Host Discussion on Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi's New Book: Architecture of Migration (2023)
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities will be hosting a discussion of Professor Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s new book, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (2023). Professor Siddiqi is the co-director of the Insurgent Domesticities Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Fellow CSSD members and Columbia faculty, Hiba Bou Akar, Anupama Rao, and Miriam Ticktin, will participate as respondents. The event will be followed by a reception.
When: Tuesday, February 6, at 6:15pm.
Where: The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University.
For information and to RSVP, please visit this page.
Zip Code Memory Project Website to be Hosted by SOF/Heyman Center
The Zip Code Memory Project, a Social Engagement project at CSSD, now has a host for its completed website (found here) through The Society of Fellows & Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
The project will also be archived in perpetuity through NYU Special Collections.
Follow this link to read more on this announcement as well as the official release from the project itself.
Recovery WG Update: Workshopping the Work of Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot & Chloé Salama Faux
The Recovery Working Group has recently workshopped Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot’s Verso book proposal as well as a chapter of Chloé Salama Faux’s dissertation, titled “African Renaissance as Primal Scene: Fantasies of Death and Rebirth after Apartheid.”
Tami Navarro, Co-Director of Transnational Black Feminisms, to Speak on Panel at the Duke Centennial
Transnational Black Feminisms Working Group Member Tami Navarro will join fellow speakers in participating in “Sitting at the Kitchen Table Again: A Decade After Fieldnotes from Women of Color in Anthropology,” a panel in the Duke Centennial on February 19, 2024.
More information about the event is forthcoming.
An Update on the Wonderful Work of Faith Adiele from the Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG
Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group member Faith Adiele’s experimental essay on her parents' courtship will appear in a special issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review: African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations, edited by Chris Abani.
In November, she presented on decolonial travel at the British Virgin Island Literary Fest with members of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (Road Town, BVI). In early December, she hosted the 2nd Annual African Literary Award at the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, USA); she also received a San Francisco Press Club Award for her entertainment review “A Light in the Window of the World: Protest Art and Black Liberation” in Smithsonian Folklife. Read more about the award here.
In addition, two writing projects launched in December: Life in the Temporary, a bilingual Arabic-English anthology published by the Olive Writers Association based in Casablanca, Morocco that she co-edited; and, the latest issue of Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature (London, UK) where she edits the Decolonising Travel section and also has an essay included about getting braids in Morocco and Nigeria.
Seeds of Diaspora WG to Host Film Screening of Naeem Mohaiemen's "Jole Dobe Na" in February
The Seeds of Diaspora Working Group is excited to announce that their February meeting, a screening of Working Group member Naeem Mohaiemen's film Jole Dobe Na, is open to attendance by all CSSD affiliates!
The screening is scheduled to take place on Friday 2/23, from 3.30 - 6 pm, in the Lifetime Screening Room (5th floor, Dodge Hall). Naeem will be in attendance for a discussion of the film after the screening, which will focus on its portrayal of plant life and feeling.
A description of the film is below:
Jole Dobe Na (Those Who Do Not Drown), 64 min, 2020
In an empty hospital in Kolkata, a man confronts protocols of blood samples, a subtly discriminatory office, regulations against bribery, and an abandoned operating theater. There are no doctors, signs of life, or residue of death. His mind is on a loop of the last weeks of his wife’s life, when a quiet argument developed between them. When is the end of medical care, whose life is it anyway? If what use is a science that can detect plant emotions, invent fingerprint technology, but fail to give dignity to the end of life.
Congratulations to Recent PhD Graduates Elizabeth Löwe Hunter & Oda-Kange Midtvåge-Diallo
CSSD is thrilled to announce that Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group members Elizabeth Löwe Hunter and Oda-Kange Midtvåge-Diallo recently completed their PhDs at the University of California, Berkeley, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and the Norwegian Technical University, Department of Comparative Cultural Studies, respectively.
Midtvåge-Diallo’s dissertation, “Joining in Black Study: Knowledge Creation and Black Feminist Critique Alongside African Norwegian Youth” is now publicly available.
Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Member Jasmine Kelekay to Join Howard University's Department of Sociology and Criminology in Fall 2024
CSSD wishes to congratulate Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group member Jasmine Kelekay, who will be joining Howard University’s Department of Sociology and Criminology as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2024.
Refugee Cities Member Organized Nov. Conference Aimed at Reframing Migrant "Crisis" in NYC
Refugee Cities working group member Hiba Bou Akar organized a conference, alongside Hugo Sarmiento, titled “The Migrant ‘Crisis’ in NYC: Immigration, Asylum, and The Right to the City.” Hosted by GSAPP, the conference was split into two panels: “Urban History of Immigrant ‘Crises’ in NYC,” “Formal and Informal Systems of Support and Care,” and “Housing Question and the Right to Shelter.”
For more on this conference, read the full Columbia Spectator story here.
Insurgent Domesticities Member Hollyamber Kennedy To Be Published in The Journal of Architecture
Insurgent Domesticities working group member Hollyamber Kennedy has a new article coming out in the Winter/Spring 2024 “Territories of Incarceration” special issue of The Journal of Architecture, titled “Wastelands of Empire and ‘Sites of Salvation’: Landscapes of ‘Reform’ in 19th Century Germany.”
More information will be shared when available.
Professor Jack Halberstam to Deliver Public Lectures in Sydney, Australia
Former co-director of the Queer Aquí working group and David Feinson Professor of the Humanities, Jack Halberstam, will be delivering a public lecture as part of the Queer PowerPoint series, held in Sydney, Australia, on December 15, 2023. In anticipation of the forthcoming work entitled The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy, this lecture will examine the particularities of what Professor Halberstam means by “wildness” as a space of possibility for breaking from binaries such as gender, sexuality and so on. Tickets are still on sale for this wonderful event here.
The event is hosted by the Power Institute at the University of Sydney.
Already sold out is Professor Halberstam’s talk on Thrusday, December 14, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia titled “All Fall Down: Post-Industrial Demolition Projects and the Aesthetic of Collapse.”
CSSD Members Participated in Faculty Roundtable "On Feminism and Palestine" on Dec. 4
CSSD Interim Director Lila Abu-Lughod, Transnational Black Feminisms co-director Premilla Nadasen, Insurgent Domesticities co-director Neferti X. M. Tadiar, and former Queer Aquí director Jack Halberstam — among others — participated in a faculty roundtable discussion titled “On Feminism and Palestine” this past Monday.
This event was co-sponsored and co-presented by Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Center for Palestine Studies, Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Iulia Stătică Publishes New Text in Routledge Architext Series: Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest (Routledge, 2023)
Iulia Stătică, member of the Insurgent Domesticities Working Group, has recently published Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest (Routledge, 2023), as a part of Routledge’s Architext series.
From Routledge: “Urban Phantasmagorias examines the legacies of socialist housing in the city of Bucharest during the period of communist rule in Romania. The book explores the manner in which the socialist state reconfigured the city through concrete acts of demolition and construction, as well as indirectly through legal frameworks aimed at the regulation of women’s reproductive agency, in an attempt to materialize its idea of modernity. It follows the effects of this state agenda with a focus on the period between 1965 and 1989 through an investigation of the transformations, representations, meanings, and uses of domestic spaces.”
Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Members to be in Conversation at UC Berkeley's Nordic Center
On December 6, two members of the Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group, Elizabeth Löwe Hunter and Jasmine Kelekay, will be in conversation at the Nordic Center at UC Berkeley. Part of the Nordic Talks podcast, the conversation will be available after the event: The Myth of the Nordic Utopia - Social Democracy Through Afro-Nordic Perspectives.
CSSD Interim Director Lila Abu-Lughod receives the 2023 Career Award from the Association for Feminist Anthropology
CSSD Interim Director Lila Abu-Lughod received the 2023 Career Award from the Association for Feminist Anthropology on November 18, 2023, at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association held in Toronto, Canada.
Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Member Temi Odumuso Participated in Weekend of Archival Happenings at SouthNord Artfest
In late November, Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group member Temi Odumuso participated in a weekend of archival happenings at the SouthNord Artfest at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Sweden. She was part of a mini-seminar in collaboration with the Ethnographic Museum on the history of black people in the Nordics.
Seeds of Diaspora Co-Director Lynnette Widder Awarded a 2023 Architecture + Design Independent Projects Grant
CSSD wishes to congratulate Seeds of Diaspora co-director Lynnette Widder for being awarded a 2023 Architecture + Design Independent Projects grant for her project, "Rogue Plants, Native Soils: Histories of Destruction and its Opposites."
For more information on both the project and the grant itself, follow this link.
Refugee Cities WG member Kian Tajbakhsh in Discussion with Gillian Triggs at "Mobilizing Action Toward the Global Compact on Refugees"
Refugee Cities working group member and Senior Advisor for the Committee on Forced Migration, Kian Tajbakhsh, participated in a discussion with Gillian Triggs, assistant high commissioner for protection with UNHCR ( United Nations refugee agency), on November 13. Titled “Mobilizing Action Toward the Global Compact on Refugees,” the event addressed topics such as new developments in global displacement & refugee protection, multi-stakeholder partnerships & innovative solutions, the Global Compact, and more.
Read more about this past event here.
Recap: Extractive Media hosts Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris on Nov. 15
On Wednesday, November 15, the Extractive Media working group hosted Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris, the Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, for a conversation on her new essay "Un-Earthing Extractive Architectures," which was recently published in e-flux Architecture.
The event was followed by a dinner at Lido in Harlem.
For the original Events page for this seminar, follow this link.
In attendance at dinner, from L to R: Extractive Media co-chair Debashree Mukherjee, Professor Reinhold Martin, Professor Jane Gaines, Professor Macarena Gómez-Barris, PhD student Cecília Resende Santos, Extractive Media graduate coordinator Hannah Pivo, Extractive Media co-chair Zeynep Çelik Alexander.