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.
Project Director: Jean Howard
Graduate Assistant: Patrick Anson
The aim of this project is to bring together Barnard and Columbia 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.
News
Events
Upcoming
Past
Fellows
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?
Black Atlantic Ecologies
Project Co-Directors: Vanessa Agard-Jones, Marisa Solomon
Project Coordinator: Chazelle Rhoden
The waters are rising. The earth is warming. Species are perishing. The world is ending.
Apocalyptic pronouncements about the refiguring of the Earth are everywhere around us. Now commonplace, predictions and pronouncements about the era that geologists have called the Anthropocene remind us that we are at the end of the world as we know it, and that global warming, rising sea levels, the acidification of the oceans, crisis-rates of species extinction and ever-escalating social disasters masked as natural ones are but some of the more visible markers of the imperilment of this planet. Though they have pretensions to inclusion, many of these emergent narratives mobilize ideas about the human, the animal and the environment that universalize rather than particularize, occluding the fact that these categorizations have long been shot through with histories of normative violence.
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 our provocation the refiguring of human and nonhuman ecologies occasioned by the transatlantic slave trade, we seek to understand what Nadia Ellis has called, riffing on José Muñoz, “the queer work of raced survival” as we come to grips with contemporary dimensions of anthropogenic climate change. As inspiration for the work that we undertake together, we 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 of our human and nonhuman cotravelers. And given the crossing of linguistic and imperial zones that the transatlantic slave trade occasioned, we pay particular attention to the divergences and synergies among anglophone, francophone, hispanophone, and lusophone analyses of our predicament as we articulate our conditions as well as the political possibilities on our horizons. 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?
IMAGE: Photo by Alyssa A.L. James, Coast of St. Lucia, 2016
The Black Atlantic Ecologies
working group is funded by the
Earth Institute.
Events
Fellows
News
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.
Migrant Personhood and Rights: Crises of Recognition
Project Co-Directors: Thea Abu El-Haj, JC Salyer
Project Coordinator: Yasmin Naji
How does a nation-state reach the point where it becomes national policy to remove thousands of children from their parents as a deterrent to seeking asylum? How does a nation-state reach the point where it prosecutes individuals for providing water to migrants in a desert? How does a nation-state reach the point that it bans people from entering the country based on their religion?
During his first week in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order that banned foreign nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. In response, there were spontaneous protests around the country and broad condemnation of the sweeping anti-immigrant nature of the policies. This pattern repeated in the succeeding months, as the executive branch continued to focus on anti-immigrant initiatives, such as family separation on the border and policies limiting receipt of public benefits by immigrants. Despite this, large segments of the public remain favorable to immigrants and immigration and perennial conflicts over immigration policy have increased, even resulting is a 35-day shutdown of the federal government.
Our project addresses anti-immigrant sentiments and policies by engaging both academic research and the expertise of community-based migrant advocacy organizations to develop novel questions and approaches that address current immigration issues. The project will culminate with a series of public interventions that allow academics, activists, artists, and advocates to communicate and cooperate in imagining justice and recognition for migrants.
News
Image by the Undocumented Migration Project.
Events
Fellows
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.
Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean
Project Co-Directors: Ana Ochoa, Ron Gregg
Project Coordinator: Julia Delgadillo
Struggles around environmental conflicts have increased dramatically in Latin America and the Caribbean over the past few decades, affecting and displacing indigenous populations, Afro-descendants, women, children, and peasants. Communities have to confront the transnational increase of agribusiness, hydroelectric projects,
mining corporations, systematic food injustice, and their entanglement with the drug war and localized armed conflicts. Such struggles are taking place amidst dramatic events provoked by climate change as well as the rise of extremist governments in the Americas, supported by the evangelical right, increasing the number of climate, alimentary, and war refugees and asylum-seekers.
The presence of evangelical missions among indigenous peoples, especially among recently contacted groups in need of assistance, is pervasive in the Amazon, in Colombia, and in Puerto Rico, and has augmented exponentially during the last decades. In reaction to persistent attempts at conversion by native and foreign missionaries, a new shamanistic movement and alliance has taken shape in several regions of Northwestern Amazonia, in Colombia, Peru and Brazil, and new transnational configurations of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian religions have emerged. A potent cosmopolitical alliance is taking shape, one whose ritual efficacy consists in
the creation of new shared artistic forms.
Our group proposes to study current struggles for justice that are articulated through the expressive cultures and aesthetic experiences of local communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. The resurgence and mobilization of what have historically been called traditional, indigenous, and Afro-descendant expressive forms-- songs, rituals, images, objects, feasts, culinary arts, and ceremonies -- has been dramatic. Since the mid-1980s, we have also seen the rise of an indigenous film movement in different countries in Latin America. Technologies such as loudspeakers, microphones, hard drives, and other media are changing public and private space. New alliances between artists, scholars, and ritual specialists like shamans or babalaos (e.g. in Colombia, Cuba and Brazil), and between sound artists and activists (e.g. in Puerto Rico and Cuba) are informing these aesthetic expressions. Our working group contends that these forms of aesthetic experience – in narrative form, through visual images, through sounds, through unexpected alliances –give shape to new ways of imagining justice and of imagining the relation between humans and non-humans, including deities and other religious entities.
News
Image: Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace
For more from the Environmental Justice working group listen to Latin America @ Columbia, a podcast hosted by working group co-director Professor Vicky Murillo, discussing major themes around Latin American history, culture, and politics.
The Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean working group is funded by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.
Events
Affiliated Faculty
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.
Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change
Project Co-Directors: Sonia Tolani, Andrea Flynn
The Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change group seeks to identify barriers to heart disease awareness and explore pathways to change on a personal individual level as well as a community and population level that lead to improved women’s heart health.
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. In fact, more than double the number of women than men die of heart disease each year. CVD affects women of all ages, and more troublingly, the rate of death in young women on the rise. Despite this, while the majority of women age 40-60 have at least one risk factor for CVD, very few have had this risk assessed by their doctor. Women are also less likely to get lifestyle advice or be given medications to prevent heart disease compared to men with a similar risk profile. Further, nearly half of women are still not aware that CVD kills more women than cancer and only about a third of Hispanic and African American women identify it as the number one cause of death.
In order to effect real change, we must not only find ways to increase awareness of heart disease in women, but also identify ways to get women to make lasting changes in their lifestyle. This group proposes to study whether one specific tool, a mobile health App called Love My Heart, is better able achieve these goals compared with usual care. In addition, we hope as a multidisciplinary group that has united faculty from different departments, to explore more broadly ways digital tools and social media can improve health education and identify what factors, i.e. fear, empowerment, etc. promote women to exercise more and eat healthier, lifestyle changes that historically have been hard to achieve with a more traditional approach.There are currently more than 165,000 mHealth apps available and 3 billion were downloaded by consumers in 2015, but so many questions about the role of technology in health care remain unanswered. For example, can self assessment of risk compensate for inadequate health system screenings? Can gameification of heart healthy goals promote better adherence and outcomes? Can social media mediate the stigma of heart disease in women? We hope by providing a forum for this discussion we will encourage further research in this developing field.
News
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.
Data Algorithms and Social Justice
Project Directors: Matthew Jones, Laura Kurgan, Dennis Tenen, Chris Wiggins
Graduate Director: Nikita Shepard
The “Data, Algorithms, and Social Justice” working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference 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. Emerging techniques of data gathering and analysis not only impact the treatment of pre-existing social groups or demographic categories, but also create new vectors of difference along lines that do not neatly correspond to pre-digital collectivities. 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.
The Data, Algorithms, and Social Justice working group brings together scholars working in a variety of disciplines at Columbia and beyond to engage these critical questions, through these core activities:
Building an interdisciplinary cohort of graduate students from different departments concerned with data and justice, through shared intellectual engagement, social events, and networking;
Presenting public events on Columbia’s (virtual) campus, including lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, and participatory technology events
Hosting a workshop series for graduate students and early career faculty from a range of disciplines to present ongoing research and works in progress before an interdisciplinary audience
Appointing graduate fellows each year to support innovative research into data, algorithms, and social justice across disciplines
Building towards organizing a conference that will bring together leading scholars, students, researchers, activists, and community stakeholders for critical conversations on how data, algorithms, and machine learning processes impact social difference and justice.
To get involved, please contact Nikita Shepard (ns3307@columbia.edu), Graduate Director
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Events
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.
Transnational Black Feminisms
Project Co-Directors: Tami Navarro, Premilla Nadasen
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 and colonialism; demands for government assistance or social services; and opposition to sexual or state violence, including Black Lives Matter. Such struggles have created the conditions of possibility for nurturing a politics of radical social transformation. They have also raised broader, foundational questions about the relationship between theory and praxis, lived experiences and the articulation of expansive visions of social change.
We have named this initiative transnational Black feminisms—with transnationalism as a modifier—because it foregrounds the long history of Black feminist praxis and theorization, dating back to the 19th century. “Black feminisms” also reflects our understanding of the importance of racial politics in the development of capitalism and global politics—what Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism”—as well as our goal of integrating a gendered analysis into the concept of racial capitalism. In an era of heightened anti-Black racism—which manifests as systematic police violence, webs of carcerality, discourses of cultural depravity, ghettoization, gentrification, and disposability—it is essential to center a politics of blackness through a feminist, queer, anti-capitalist and anti-imperial lens, as an important vector for the political and social possibilities of imagining and working towards the realization of justice.
In addition, problematic historical and contemporary stagings of the history of feminism in the U.S. position Black women as marginal to a more significant, mainstream white feminist movement, circumscribe them to a limited time frame, and continue the erasure of a long history of a Black feminist politic that was diasporic, imaginative, and radical in both theory and praxis. We hope to explore the historic and ongoing intellectual engagements between Black feminism, transnational feminism, queer politics, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism—all of which Black feminisms speak to through Black women’s analyses of intersecting oppressions, the simultaneity of oppression, and strategies for reimagining freedom.
We are particularly interested in charting, exploring, and interrogating the nuances and intricacies of transnational Black feminisms across time and space. Black feminist theoretical lenses have evolved out of internationalist and oppositional engagements throughout the Caribbean, Africa, South America, and Europe. This expansive global view will enable us to assess the coherence and/or visibility of a transnational Black feminist politic, as well as the convergences and divergences, overlaps and contradictions, and synergistic associations among Black feminism, Indigenous feminism, Latinx feminism, and Asian feminism.
News
Events
Upcoming
Past
Fellows
Pedagogies of Dignity
Pedagogies of Dignity (2018-19) was an interdisciplinary initiative that brought together formerly incarcerated people, activists, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Pedagogies of Dignity
Project Directors: Christia Mercer
Graduate Assistant: Olivia Leigh Branscum
Pedagogies of Dignity was an interdisciplinary initiative that brought together formerly incarcerated people, activists, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from the Humanities and Social Sciences.
This project had a theoretical and practical component. The theoretical component explored the philosophical and political importance of human dignity. In current debates about criminal justice reform, institutionalized racism, systemic economic injustice, and related issues, the notion of human dignity has emerged as key. The practical component of our project involved the development of a pedagogy of dignity. The formerly incarcerated members of our group worked with those who have taught in prison to create best-practice standards for such teaching. Our practical work informed – and was informed by – our theoretical conversations.
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Events
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.
Menstrual Health and Gender Justice
Project Co-Directors: Inga Winkler and Lauren C. Houghton
Project Coordinator: Susanne Prochazka (2023), Michelle Chouinard (2021)
Media Fellow: Amitoj Singh (2020)
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.
The field is rich with questions: How do women and girls decide which menstrual care practices to adopt? How do girls experience menarche, how do women experience menopause, and what shapes these experiences? How do social media, magazines and social enterprises influence the discourse on menstruation? What are the implications of the recent case supported by the ACLU in which a woman claims to have been fired for leaking menstrual blood at work? Do recent policy developments address the needs of all menstruators, including the most marginalized? What is the role of development agencies and philanthropists in supporting menstrual hygiene management? What kind of interventions do they support and with which results? To what extent does language – menstrual health or menstrual hygiene management – matter? What cultural and religious practices exist around menstruation and how do they relate to gender equality?
Attention to menstrual issues across the lifespan surfaces broader societal issues and tensions, including gender inequality, practices and discourses of embodiment, processes of radicalization and commodification, and emergent technologies. From the perspective of gender equality, menstruation is a fascinating subject of study as it combines various facets including biological processes, deeply rooted stereotypes and social norms, and associated cultural and religious practices. Menstruation has become a category of analysis as a multi-dimensional transdisciplinary subject of inquiry and advocacy. Against this background, this working group capitalizes on the presence of faculty across different departments interested in menstruation and provides a forum for encouraging individual and collaborative research that crosses disciplinary boundaries.
News
Publications
"Making Bubbles"
Photo credit: Jen Lewis, menstrual designer, Rob Lewis, photographer. Copyright 2018 Beauty in Blood
For more from the Menstrual Health
working group find them online:
Periods at Columbia Blog
Facebook
Twitter
Events
Fellows
Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City
Geographies of Injustice is a working group of interdisciplinary scholars who are interested in asking how spatial politics intersects with inequality and social difference (race, caste, and ethnicity).
Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City
Project Co-Directors: Anupama Rao, Ana Paulina Lee
Project Coordinators: Ana Luiza de Abreu Claudio (2023), Iuri Bauler (2022), Sohini Chattopadhyay (2021)
Media Fellow: Jessica Jacolbe (2020)
Geographies of Injustice is a working group committed to exploring the question of subaltern urbanism and aesthetics from an explicitly South-South perspective by bringing urban studies into conversation with studies of social difference, inequality, and cultural production. We have a specific focus on representation and decolonization as they relate to subaltern urban architectural and infrastructural forms. We are particularly keen to bring studies of planning and built form into conversation with concerns about the particular vulnerabilities that minority communities face in navigating situations of urban marginalization.
Our project, “Reconstructing Memory in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas and Mumbai’s Zhopdis” seeks to develop a template for addressing spatial politics through engagements with historical memory, music, performance, and creative survival strategies of subaltern communities. Our working group draws on the convergent yet distinct urban trajectories of Bombay/Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro, cities associated with the slum and the favela, respectively, as connected sites from which to better apprehend today’s global housing crisis. We work with community museums and grassroots organizations to develop solutions that will influence policy and sustainable urban planning. We approach self-housing settlements in Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai through connected histories of the Global South where cheap labor, urban conflict and precarious living conditions define the social life of peripheral capitalism.
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Publications
Image by Michael Alvarez from the series, "We're Out Here"
Events
Fellows
On The Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics
The working group On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics seeks to understand the role of nurses as change agents in the prevention, detection and response to pandemic infectious disease outbreaks.
On The Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics
Project Directors: Jennifer Dohrn, Wilmot James, Victoria Rosner
Coordinators: Kurt Holuba, Mina Shah
Graduate Assistant: Lauren J. DeVaughn
The working group On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics seeks to understand the role of nurses as change agents in the prevention, detection and response to pandemic infectious disease outbreaks. Although nurses are crucial to combatting pandemics, their work is often not considered when international leaders gather to discuss global health issues. This is a consequence of both the MD-centered hierarchy of medical practice and the fact that nursing remains a profession in which women – whose work is systemically undervalued -- predominate (in the US, over 90% of registered nurses are women). This is a dangerous omission, since although nurses are on the front lines of care, little is known about the range of activities they undertake beyond what may be obvious in patient care. Even key clinical innovations are often overlooked when they should be universally implemented. And there is little record of the painful choices nurses and other health professionals often make between taking care of patients and protecting themselves and their families.
This working group is necessarily inter-sectoral and inter-disciplinary. On the Frontlines draws on the work of the health science community – nursing, medicine, public health, evolutionary biology and immunology, as well as demography – to understand the changing nature of infectious diseases and how to manage and contain them. We engage the scholarship – international health regulations, international law and the doctrine of the duty to protect – that deals with the ethical character of leadership in the global health and biodefense communities and the barriers nursing leaders face in pursuing the public good. Further, to document the role of nurses, we draw on historical methods, anthropology and journalism to capture nurses’ experience in the field.
This group formed around an interest in understanding the work of nurses and midwives in the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In response to recent events, we have expanded our scope to include a comparative study of the work of nurses and midwives in the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. In collaboration with the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, we are conducting oral histories of COVID-19 nurses, and this effort is being jointly directed by Mary Marshall Clark and Jennifer Dohrn.
News
Jennifer Dohrn, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, 2006
Forth coming: FrontlineNurses.org
Currently under construction, frontlinenurses.org will feature interviews with nurses active during the 2014-16 Ebola crisis in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Events
Fellows
Student Associates
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.
Racial Capitalism
Project Directors: Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, and Manu Karuka
Graduate Assistant: Hannah Pullen-Blasnik
Media Fellow: Larry Madowo (2020)
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 constitutive 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.
The working group, directed by Jordan T. Camp, Term Assistant Professor of American Studies, Barnard College; Christina Heatherton, Assistant Professor of American Studies, Barnard College; and Manu Vimalassery, Assistant Professor of American Studies, Barnard College, theorizes the connections between exploitation and expropriation in interlinked political geographies. The “Racial Capitalism” working group will build on and also expand already existing efforts of the Barnard New Directions in American Studies (NDAS) initiative.
With members that include scholars from Barnard, Columbia, and the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (CPCP) at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as local scholars, graduate students, organizers, and visiting international scholars, this group seeks to ask: what visions of justice does the critique of political economy enable us to imagine, and to achieve? Through public lectures, seminars, manuscript workshops, conferences, community-based research projects, publications, exhibitions, and a digital archive, the working group seeks to gain clarity on the material and ideological links between Indigenous dispossession, racism, imperialism, and capitalist political economy.
News
Elizabeth Catlett, "Watts: Detroit: Washington: Harlem: Newark" (1970)
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Publications
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.
Queer Aqui
formerly Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere
Project Co-Directors: Jack Halberstam, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Daniel Da Silva
Project Coordinator: Levi C. R. Hord
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 the vast network of queer scholars here in the New York area and reaches out to groups in Beirut, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro, Quito and Istanbul in order 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 worldwide. This group’s main focus is in considering the place of sexuality and gender in both the spread of global capitalism and right-wing populism and in the activist responses to these new forms of authoritarianism.
Scholars in this group have worked on neoliberalism, LGBT law, trans* issues, transnational imaginaries, queer diaspora, negative affects, art and politics, the queer decolonial, temporality and spatiality, phenomenology and much more. This is a multidisciplinary group with many transnational contacts and contexts that is committed to asking questions about the future of queer politics, the future of queer culture and the potential of new forms of solidarity, protest and queer thought.
News
Publications
"Facial Weaponization Suite: Fag Face Mask” by Zach Blas, 2012, photo by Christopher O’Leary.
Events
Fellows
RELIGION AND THE GLOBAL FRAMING OF GENDER VIOLENCE
Who pays the price and who benefits from the ways that religion is used to frame global understandings of Violence Against Women and gender violence? Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence (2016-19) aimed to reframe the conversation.
RELIGION AND THE GLOBAL FRAMING OF GENDER VIOLENCE
Project Directors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, Janet Jakobsen, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW)––and more recently, the expansive term “gender-based violence” (GBV)––has come to prominence as a highly visible and powerful agenda across a range of local, national, and global domains. By embedding gender violence in a complex matrix of international norms, legal sanctions, and humanitarian aid, the anti-VAW movement has been able to achieve a powerful international “common sense” for defining, measuring, and attending to violence against women in developing countries, particularly during conflict and post-conflict situations. Here, religion is regularly linked to gendered violence. We have seen this script play out countless times. Entire religious traditions are said to promote “cultures of violence.” Women in war are then abstracted out of their local contexts. The definition of VAW is narrowed to attacks on their bodily integrity (e.g. rape), and economic, political and structural forms of violence are excluded. Ending VAW becomes casus belli; local women’s calls for safe homes, safe public spaces, and stable governments are rendered unrecognizable as anti-violence interventions.
However, despite this powerful conflation of religion and VAW for geo-political ends, the crucial question of how religion intersects with VAW/GBV has hardly begun to be considered. Why and when is “religion” invoked in global responses to VAW/GBV? What roles are attributed to religion in these dynamic processes? How are new understandings of “religion” engineered through regimes of governance? What categories of the religious become seen as credible and acceptable, and are empowered as anti-GBV actors? What falls out? Who pays a price and who benefits from the ways religion is used to frame global understandings of VAW/GBV?
Given growing concerns about the conflation of religion and VAW for geo-political ends, the time is ripe for a project that mobilizes the collective experience, expertise, and creativity of an international group of critical feminist scholars, practitioners, activists, and journalists. “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence” examined the role of religion in naming, framing, and governing gendered violence. This three-year initiative was supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and was co-directed by Professor Lila Abu-Lughod (Anthropology/Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality). Through a focus on the Middle East and South Asia, the project opened a critical global conversation with the conviction that more nuanced analyses lead both to more effective strategies for decreasing gender violence, and to more robust understandings of how certain framings of religion and violence can cloud the very diagnoses that are so essential to treating human suffering.
Project co-directors with Abu-Lughod included Professors Rema Hammami, Institute of Women’s Studies, Birzeit University; Janet Jakobsen, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College; and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Director of the Gender Studies Program, Mada Al-Carmel, Arab Center for Applied Research.
The project is supported by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation from its initiative on Religion and International Affairs.
Fellows
Media Fellows
Events
News
THE RURAL-URBAN INTERFACE: GENDER AND POVERTY IN GHANA AND KENYA, STATISTICS AND STORIES
The Rural-Urban Interface (2015-18) studied migrant populations of women, youth and men in Ghana and in Kenya by combining oral histories with statistical analysis.
THE RURAL-URBAN INTERFACE: GENDER AND POVERTY IN GHANA AND KENYA, STATISTICS AND STORIES
Project Directors: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Reinhold Martin
This project, which represented the workshop phase of an interdisciplinary, regional, consortial, Africa-led research endeavor, studied the rural-urban interface in Ghana and in Kenya, concentrating on the experience of women, youth, and men who inhabit this social and physical space. The research group included colleagues at the Universities of Ghana-Legon and Nairobi as well as at Columbia and other New York-area institutions.
The rural-urban interface or continuum extends from the rural to the towns and cities of the African continent. It is quite variegated and is characterized by a complex nexus of sites, including primary and secondary sites in relationships of gain and loss, dominance and subordination, associated in different ways with rural-to-urban migration. This first phase of the project therefore attempted to situate key questions in the African context, and especially, in the rural-urban dynamics of the specific region being studied. Such questions included the interaction of space, gender, and political economy; the role of translation in interpretative social-scientific work; and the interplay of stories and statistics in knowledge making.
Workshops based on a pilot study initiated by colleagues on Ghana and/or Nairobi piad particular attention to gender relations in this space and to the feminization of poverty in migrant populations. The mix of approaches drawn from the humanities and social sciences was intended to help create productive collaborations among disciplines and among many actors, to get behind the statistics and move towards changing minds and building human capacity. As a working group, we looked at ways to combine qualitative knowledge with quantitative knowledge in a manner that highlights the real, impactful capacity of situated stories, narratives, and oral histories articulated by actual participants in these large-scale transformations, to illuminate and inflect the interpretation of other types of data that tend to dominate accounts and disproportionately inform policies. The humanities are a crucial source of knowledge of this sort, and, of language-sensitive learning techniques that are attentive to nuance and open to unexpected information or interpretations. Working with narratives, as well as statistics, yielded nuanced insights that are unavailable to more conventional approaches.
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GENDER & THE GLOBAL SLUM
How are gender relations impacted by material impoverishment and social segregation? Gender & the Global Slum (2013-17) looked at the social hazards of urban informality and its disproportionate effects on women.
GENDER & THE GLOBAL SLUM
Project Directors: Saidiya Hartman, Anupama Rao, Neferti Tadiar
Urbanization is a defining feature of contemporary globalization. The “megacities” of the twenty-first century are distinguished by two things: their location in the global South, and the ubiquity of informal, or “slum” housing as the primary mode of inhabitation for the majority of their urban dwellers (UNHCS Report, Challenge of Slums 2003; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums 2006). Contemporary urbanization thus presents us with a paradox: it is characterized by spectacular levels of economic growth, together with the informalization of existence.
How have informal housing and the contemporary slum become sites of global intervention, simultaneously conceived as (social) problem, and the site of social experimentation and creative, or resistant life? How are urban social relations, especially of gender, being transformed in the wake of neoliberalism, and the re-territorialization of urban space? Why do women suffer disproportionately from the social hazards of urban informality?
It is typical to attribute the persistence of slums in the global South to the culture of poverty, or as signs of corrupt or insufficient planning. Instead this project addressed the global slum as the product of a complex interplay between the political economy of urban space, and the spatialization of social difference, especially gender/sexuality. Our project addressed the contemporary “slum” as a social-spatial ensemble produced by overlapping and intersecting forces. These included: changing ideas about housing as a right vs. marketized commodity; infrapolitics, i.e., practices from electricity and water theft, to acts of defacement and violent conflict that are a response to social precarity and informalized existence; and the impact of international NGOs and the World Bank in shaping contemporary debates about slum redevelopment and rehabilitation. We located women’s growing vulnerability to new forms of intimate and extimate violence, and their reliance on illicit economies of survival and subsistence (including sex work) within broader infrastructural and policy shifts, to explore how gender is made and unmade in the context of global power.
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Reframing Gendered Violence
Reframing Gendered Violence (2016-19) aimed to open up a critical global dialogue among scholars and practitioners that recasts and broadens our understanding of what constitutes violence against women.
Reframing Gendered Violence
Project Directors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Kaiama Glover, Jennifer Hirsch, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Anupama Rao, Kendall Thomas, Paige West
Reframing Gendered Violence opened up a critical global conversation among scholars and practitioners that recasts the problem of violence against women as it is currently discussed in a wide range of fields, both academic and policy-oriented, including human rights, public health, journalism, law, feminist studies, literature, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, and history.
Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) have come to prominence as loci for activism throughout the world. Both VAW and GBV regularly garner international media attention and occupy a growing place in international law and global governance. Since 2000 alone there have been more than 25 UN protocols, instruments and conventions directed at its eradication or mitigation.
The working group engaged critically with the terms, the assumptions, and the policies that have underwritten this unprecedented outpouring of attention. What do different parties mean when they talk of violence against women or of gender-based violence? Is the main form of violence against women sexual in nature? Does it occur primarily in domestic settings? What is left out when the problem is framed in this way, and whose interests are served by such a framing? When invoked in the halls of the United Nations and used to shape international policy, the terms violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) are often assumed to have stable meanings, yet they do not.
CSSD, in collaboration with scholars, artists and activists located in the regions where Columbia has established Global Centers, examined in the most capacious way what constitutes gendered violence. The goal was to move the conversation on this crucial topic in new directions, pointing to elisions and exclusions in many common-sense understandings of these terms; deepening the ways in which we engage with the manifestations and causes of such violence; unpacking the politics through which accusations of GBV can sometimes be used to pathologize entire communities, societies or religious traditions, or to divert attention from more systemic forms of abuse such as economic, discursive, and political violence.
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Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics
Applying lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and inequality to the current analyses of climate change in the Pacific Region, Pacific Climate Circuits (2015-18) sought to reframe the conversation about climate change and Pacific Islanders.
Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics
Project Directors: Paige West, Kevin Fellezs, J.C. Salyer
Pacific Climate Circuits applied lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and inequality to the current analyses of climate change in the Pacific Region. The working group, directed by Paige West, Department Chair and Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College; Kevin Fellezs, Assistant Professor of Music and African American Studies, Columbia University; and J.C. Salyer, Term Assistant Professor of Practice, Sociology, Barnard College, examined the specific political-economic systems culpable for climate change in the region, linking them to its histories of colonialism and neoliberalism. Researchers sought solutions outside the typical hard sciences approach, instead drawing on scholarship in the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences to scrutinize the region, its environment, and its people.
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Bandung Humanisms
This interdisciplinary research project, Bandung Humanisms (2015-18), examined the workings of the progressive political, social, and cultural movement among nations of the Global South that refused to ally with either major power bloc during the cold war.
Bandung Humanisms
Project Directors: Stathis Gourgouris, Lydia Liu
Bandung Humanisms was an interdisciplinary research project examining the workings of Bandung Humanisms, the progressive political, social, and cultural movement among nations of the Global South that refused to ally with either major power bloc during the Cold War. The working group, a collaboration between scholars at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles uncoverd the post-colonial developing world’s espousal of a radical brand of humanism and self-determination that gave rise to the Non-Aligned Movement of non-aggressor states. The working group traced the institutions, associations, writings, and artworks identified with the Bandung Humanisms movement, connecting them to current global struggles for social justice.
The diverse group of scholars included Stathis Gourgouris, Professor, Classics, Columbia University; Aamir Mufti, Professor, Comparative Literature, UCLA; and Lydia Liu, Director, Institute of Comparative Literature & Society and Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities, Department of East Asian Languages, Columbia University.
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UNPAYABLE DEBT: CAPITAL, VIOLENCE, AND THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY
Unpayable Debt (2016-19) was a comparative research and public engagement project about the emergence and impact of massive debt on vulnerable polities and populations.
UNPAYABLE DEBT: CAPITAL, VIOLENCE, AND THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY
Project Directors: Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Sarah Muir
Graduate Assistant: Laura Charney
Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy raised critical questions about the role of debt in contemporary capitalism; the relationship between debt, migration, and violence; and the emergence of new political and cultural identities, particularly among subordinated groups. The project's members, which included scholars, filmmakers, and journalists, examined the politics of information asymmetry—a lack of data and conceptual tools—and how this might undermine social mobilization in impoverished communities, peoples, and countries.
The interdisciplinary group compared recent and landmark cases such as Puerto Rico, Argentina, Greece, Spain, and U.S. cities like Detroit as well as other spaces that have been historically affected by debt. The project also developed a web platform to disseminate existing information, facilitate public engagement, and increase discussion about the politics of debt.
The project’s directors were Sarah Muir, Term Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University and Frances Negrón Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University.
See the press release for the working group's digital PRSyllabus explaining the Puerto Rican debt crisis.
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