We are scholars across disciplines focusing on Asia and Africa who seek to bring premodern knowledge traditions, epistemologically decolonized, into dialogue with social and natural scientists focused on the interlocking crises of capitalism, colonialism, and climate chaos. We hope, ultimately, to be able to think towards alternatives to models of analysis and practice that have rendered scholarship and art irrelevant to our times, and to modes of life leading to the destruction of our planet.
Creative Resistances: Arts and Activism in the Americas
We bring together scholars, activists, and artists from across the Americas to explore modes of creative resistance. We aim to analyze how art and activism intersect, considering the diverse contexts of Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. We investigate how artistic interventions are utilized to imagine alternative futures amidst the rise of far-right governments and repressive political regimes. Our inquiry seeks to understand the continuity and divergence of creative tactics in political resistance, comparing contemporary approaches with historical precedents.
Seeds of Diaspora
Afro-Nordic Feminisms
This working group is a Black feminist research and pedagogical project that centers Afro-Nordic identity, culture, social movements, and social justice organizing. We are calling this initiative Afro/Nordic/Feminisms, as we are interested in the areas of inquiry and methodologies named by the interplay between the three terms.
Refugee Cities: Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement
We are a group of scholars from across disciplines and institutions interested in bringing together the increasingly interrelated fields of Refugee Studies and Urban Studies. While there are few scholars or institutions that explicitly and intentionally consider these fields together, the expanding number of internationally displaced people settling in cities and interacting with and in urban spaces across the globe merits sustained engagement and analysis.
Extractive Media: Infrastructures & Aesthetics of Depletion
Questions of resource extraction are now front and center in almost every academic discipline across the humanities and social sciences. Propelled by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, scholars are reinventing their core research questions to ask how we came to this pass, and also where do we go from here? The Extractive Media working group seeks to take this conversation beyond fossil fuels to track the ways in which energy economies span continents and oceans, differentially affect unequal bodies and lives, and bleed across disparate sites such as the coal mine and the computer screen.
Recovery
In accordance with the CSSD’s designated focus on Imagining Justice, our working group critically considers the circulations of “recovery” in arenas such as biomedicine, pandemic politics, climate change, economics, and other fields of governance. Aligned with current scholarly and activist efforts to think through the transformations in social relations required for meaningful versions of repair and recuperation, we are particularly interested in challenging presumptions of the feasibility/desirability of a return to a prior normative state. Instead, we aim to consider how a transformative justice approach might spur new imaginations of not only social justice but also embodiment, health, individual well-being and collective dis-ease.
Prison Education and Social Justice
This project brings together faculty and graduate students with alums of Columbia’s prison education programs to think together about how to strengthen the courses and other educational opportunities Columbia presently offers to incarcerated students; to develop new courses and faculty training supports for those initiatives; and to think about and develop a more systematic set of classes to be offered to Columbia and Barnard undergraduates dealing with social justice and its relationship to carceral systems.
Motherhood and Technology
The Motherhood and Technology working group will explore how technological innovations have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood in recent decades. Advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of novel kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites mark this emerging constellation.
Insurgent Domesticities
Insurgent Domesticities brings into focus the insurgent environments, objects, and practices that make up the maintenance, creation, labor, and intimacies of home. Our collective investigates the more processual aspects of domesticity, to interrogate the politics of ‘home,’ through histories of solidarity, disobedience, stealth, and militancy, from the scale of the clothesline to that of the state.
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. This group poses a single central question: How might Black Atlantic experience with peril, with perishment and with premature death offer a rubric for thinking futurity, including reproductive futurity, in a moment of environmental collapse?
Migrant Personhood and Rights: Crises of Recognition
This working group will explore the long-standing global crisis of recognition at the heart of anti-immigrant ideas and policies. It will focus on the discourses, practices, and institutions that actively deny immigrants recognition, as well as those discourses, practices, and institutions that recognize, support, and affirm migrants and their rights. They will engage with these issues in the areas of civics and education, immigration law and policy, and the characterization and treatment of migrants and refugees.
Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean
In response to the increasing power of the evangelical right in Latin America and the Caribbean, this project traces renewed interest in traditional and indigenous belief systems that have fueled struggles for environmental justice. These struggles rely on expressive and aesthetic forms such as ritual, song, and performance. These forms, in turn, give shape to new modes of imagining environmental justice. This comparative project is undertaken by a working group of scholars, artists and activists from Columbia University in collaboration with colleagues from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality for women in the United States, accounting for more deaths than breast cancer, cervical cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease combined, yet awareness of risk factors for CVD in women is extremely low and underprioritized. This group looks at big questions about what motivates women to make tangible changes to their health behaviors, and how to get people in health care policy, research funding, and the media more invested in women’s health issues.
Data Algorithms and Social Justice
The “Data, Algorithms, and Social Justice” working group catalyzes interdisciplinary dialogues and research into urgent contemporary issues around artificial intelligence, automated decision-making, power, and social change. In the twenty-first century, conceptions of social difference are shifting rapidly in response to the increasing influence of algorithms and automated decision-making processes, with profound impacts on employment, medical care, criminal justice, government services, and more. To effectively intervene in the injustices posed by our data-driven world will require new approaches and analytical tools, combining the critical lenses of the humanities with the skills of data scientists, programmers, statisticians, and more.
Transnational Black Feminisms
The Transnational Black Feminisms working group aims to think about how transnational Black feminisms can move us beyond survivability and demands for recognition, and instead generate alternative frames and understandings around belonging, community, justice, and equity. Black feminism has, by necessity, emerged in tandem with political mobilizations: the struggle against slavery anti-colonialism; demands for government assistance or social services; and opposition to sexual or state violence, including Black Lives Matter.
Pedagogies of Dignity
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, with interest in examining whose voices are being represented in the field, which actors shape the dominant narrative, whose voices are marginalized, what the gaps are, and how interdisciplinary collaboration might help remedy some of these gaps.
