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
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.
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.
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.
Pedagogies of Dignity
Racial Capitalism
Since its first usage by antiapartheid activists in South Africa to its elaboration by political theorist, Cedric J. Robinson, racial capitalism is a concept that delineates the interlinked relationships of race and class constitute of global capitalism. The racial capitalism working group is a site of sustained collaborative research and study. Our collective work is rooted in a commitment to Black radicalism, historical materialism, feminism, and anti-imperialism.
Queer Aqui
Queer Aqui is a CSSD working group to discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame. This group builds upon a vast network of queer scholars worldwide to consider how best to resituate queer studies to respond to shifts in the meanings of family, sexual health, gendered embodiment, religion, sexual practices, gender variance, activism and sexual communities.
Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics
Bandung Humanisms
UNPAYABLE DEBT: CAPITAL, VIOLENCE, AND THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY
Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture
Precision Medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person. Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture (2016-19) examines the ethical, legal, and political implications of precision medicine research.
The Digital Black Atlantic
The Digital Black Atlantic Project (2013-16) was a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary working group that came together to invent a scholarly resource and digital platform for multimedia explorations and documentations of literary texts, visual documents, sites, moments, rituals and ceremonies, monuments and memorials, performances, and material objects emerging out of and concerning the Black Atlantic world.
The Future of Disability Studies
The Future of Disability Studies (2013-16) engaged ethical and political questions about the beginning and end of life, prenatal testing, abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, technologies for the medical correction and “cure” of the non-normative body, disease, wartime injuries, post-traumatic stress, and healthcare, as well as the dynamics of social inclusion and/or exclusion.