Imagining Justice

Women Creating Change

RELIGION AND THE GLOBAL FRAMING OF GENDER VIOLENCE

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.
 

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THE RURAL-URBAN INTERFACE: GENDER AND POVERTY IN GHANA AND KENYA, STATISTICS AND STORIES

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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WOMEN CREATING CHANGE

WOMEN CREATING CHANGE

Women Creating Change (WCC) draws together distinguished feminist scholars from across Columbia to focus on contemporary global problems affecting women and on women’s roles in addressing those problems. At the heart of WCC are working groups – scholars, students, practitioners, and socially engaged artists (filmmakers, dramatists, photographers) who meet in New York and at Columbia’s Global Centers with partners from across the world. Promoting networks of experts and activists that cross national and disciplinary borders, WCC envisions ethical and viable solutions to urgent problems concerning women, gender, and inequality. It also engages with other global networks and groups working to raise awareness of these problems, on campus and beyond, and is committed to the pursuit of social justice and a democratic future. WCC pursues research, teaching, writing and collaborative work that is necessarily interdisciplinary as well as comparative and transnational and that benefits from the rich resources and global perspective afforded by the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) and by Columbia University’s Global Centers.

GENDER & THE GLOBAL SLUM

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

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

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

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: 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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Keywords

Keywords: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations draws participants together from a wide range of disciplinary homes in order to explore the various ways we think about fundamental critical/theoretical ideas and to generate new vocabularies and new methodologies. 

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Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture

Project Directors: Rachel Adams, Gil Eyal, Maya Sabatello
Graduate Assistant: Daniel Wojtkiewicz

Precision medicine—an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person—raises a myriad of cultural, political, and historical questions that the humanities and social sciences are uniquely positions to address. The PMEPC lecture series represents a broad-based exploration of questions that precision medicine raises in law, ethics, the social sciences, economics, and the humanities.

The Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture Project is co-directed by Rachel Adams, PhD, Professor of English; and Maya Sabatello, LLB, PhD, Assistant Professor of Clinical Bioethics. The PMEPC is co-sponsored by Columbia Precision Medicine & Society and the CSSD.

PMEPC events are free and open to the public. For more information on this project, please visit socialdifference.columbia.edu or email Daniel Wojtkiewicz at dnw2116@columbia.edu

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The Digital Black Atlantic

The Digital Black Atlantic

Project Directors: Kaiama L. Glover, David Scott

The Digital Black Atlantic Project (DBAP) 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. From the epic prose-poems of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott, to the city of New Orleans as Atlantic capital, to the explosive moment of historical convergence that was the year 1968, the rhizomatic literary, performative, historical, geographical and other paradigms of the Black Atlantic demand to be approached from as many informed disciplinary perspectives as possible. DBAP sought to place these and other perspectives in immediate and sustained dialogue with one another, building "deep texts" -- experiences of carefully curated content that allow for enriched engagements with regional cultural productions. Initial work focused on the Caribbean and its diaspora, analyzing the intersection of information technologies with fields such as American studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, black studies, ethnomusicology, and communications, among others.

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Women Mobilizing Memory

Women Mobilizing Memory

Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations?

Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.

VIDEO: Marianne Hirsch and Ayşe Gül Altınay Discuss Women Mobilizing Memory Book Launch at the 2019 Mnemonics Summer School Lecture Series, Memory and Activism

Women Mobilizing Memory Book Events

Editors

Ayşe Gül Altınay is professor of cultural anthropology and director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence at Sabancı University.

María José Contreras is a performance artist and associate professor at the Faculty of the Arts of the Universidad Católica de Chile.

Marianne Hirsch is professor of English, comparative literature, and gender studies at Columbia University.

Jean Howard is professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Banu Karaca is assistant professor of anthropology and a Mercator-IPC Fellow at the Istanbul Policy Center.

Alisa Solomon is professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the MA Arts and Culture concentration.

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Project Directors: Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Diana Taylor

Bringing together artists, writers, theater practitioners, museologists, legal scholars, social activists, and scholars of memory and memorialization, “Women Mobilizing Memory” focused on the political stakes and consequences of witnessing and testimony as responses to socially imposed vulnerability and historical trauma. It probed how individual and collective testimony and performance can establish new forms of cultural memory and facilitate social repair. Using gender as an analytic lens, this project explicitly explored women's acts of witness and the gendered forms and consequences of political repression and persecution. It asked what strategies of memorialization and re-imagining are most effective in calling attention to past and present wrongs and in creating possibilities of redress.

The group studied literary texts, visual images, memorials, archives of oral history and performances in the broadest sense, including acts of protest and the work of activist groups.

Hosted by the Columbia Global Centers in Latin America: Santiago and Istanbul, Turkey, it brought together feminist artists, scholars and activists from Columbia and the New York area with colleagues from Chile and Turkey.

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GENDER, RELIGION AND LAW IN MUSLIM SOCIETIES

Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies

Project Directors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Katherine Ewing

Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies was a project that studied the unique forms of women’s activism across the Muslim world, looking at how efforts by women to work within an explicitly religious framework in order to transform society and participate more fully in public debates have influenced state. The group explored the divergences and points of contact between the flourishing work of those termed “Islamic feminists” and those who might best be called “Islamist women,” and evaluated the academic research used to promote the social inclusion and wider political transformation of women in the Islamic world.

In addition to the Center for the Study of Social Difference, this project received support from the Luce Foundation through the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion’s project “Who’s Afraid of Sharia?”

The project presented three workshops:

Workshop I:  Islamic Feminists, Islamist Women, and the Women Between
Organized by Lila Abu-Lughod, Katherine Ewing, and Anupama Rao

Over the past two decades, women’s activism has taken creative new forms across the Muslim world. Working within the frame of Islamic piety and engaging fully with the Muslim tradition, many women have been distancing themselves from the largely secular feminist projects of social reform, legal rights, or empowerment-through-development that had dominated the social field of women’s activism in most post-independence nations across the Muslim world.

Yet these efforts by women to work within an explicitly religious framework in order to transform society, refashion their roles as women, redefine their authority, and participate more fully in public debates and political fields have taken radically different paths, and influenced state policy in a number of ways. The first workshop brought together experts on gender, Islam, and various Muslim communities to explore the divergences and points of contact between the flourishing work of those who could be termed “Islamic feminists” and the locally but widely appealing work of those who might best be called “Islamist women.”

Islamic feminists are cosmopolitan educated women, often based in the West, who seek to enhance women’s rights and promote gender egalitarianism through reforms of Islamic family law and through re-interpretations of the key religious texts. They are concerned to counter “conservative” ideologies. This distinguishes them from “Islamist women,” among whom would be counted the significant numbers of women affiliated with the range of Islamist political parties operating in various countries, whether oppositional or government-affiliated. 

Bringing together international scholars who work on different regions--from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa--this project examined these activist projects in light of the everyday lives of the women in between to whom they seek to appeal, paying close attention to diverse political and social contexts. 

Workshop II:  The Power of Women’s Islamic Education
November 8-9, 2013
Columbia University

Across the Muslim world, women are attending not just mosque study groups but new institutes for Islamic studies, Islamic universities, and seminaries. In the Western media “madrasas” are presented as incubators for fundamentalism. Islamic education is associated more with indoctrination and conservatism than enlightenment. As part of poverty alleviation and the empowerment of girls and women, the UN’s Global Education First Initiative seeks to “spur a global movement to put quality, relevant and transformative education right at the heart of the social, political and development agendas.” While this initiative recognizes “a broad spectrum of actors,” does Islamic schooling fit?

This workshop brought together scholars who have done ethnographic and historical research on women’s Islamic education in various countries to think more seriously about the types and content of these forms of schooling, the reasons why women are pursuing religious education when (secular) state education is widely available alongside it, and the social and personal impacts of these forms of education. From daily life to social relations and hierarchies; from forms of authority to the paths opened up; from intellectual skills to social capital: careful assessment is needed to appreciate the popularity of Islamic education, its political and social uses, and the ways it both empowers and limits women.

Workshop III:  Debating the “Woman Question” in the New Middle East Women’s Rights, Citizenship, and Social Justice
May 3-4, 2014
Columbia Global Center \ Middle East
Organizing Committee: Lila Abu-Lughod, Hoda El Sadda, Amal Ghandour, and Safwan Masri

In light of the recent events across the Arab region, the time is opportune for a careful examination of the new opportunities and challenges facing Arab women. The Arab uprisings sought to challenge the status quo, demanding significant political and social transformation. Many women in the region hope that the “Arab Spring” will also mark a new dawn for women’s rights as well. Yet despite socio-political gains to be made by citizens in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), women’s full citizenship rights and privileges may still fall short. Debates about women’s rights and the place of women’s rights in political and economic struggles have become contentious.

What is distinctive about all these debates about women in the Arab world, as well as women’s activism on the ground in various countries in the region, is that they have occurred from the start in a context in which the international community have insistently made women’s citizenship and rights a key symbol of the success or failure of the revolutions and the value of new political orders. How does this international interest, which itself is linked to longstanding political and economic interests in the region (including alliances with the old regimes), affect the work of Arab women activists, the political projects they seek to undertake, and even the definitions of social justice with which they can work?

This workshop brought together scholars, academics, and practitioners for a collective critical evaluation of the situation, to consider how academic research on gender and rights relates to the work of practitioners in women’s organizations, and to assess conventional arguments about what is impeding women from full entitlements of citizenship. The goal was to develop the knowledge necessary for creative and effective strategies for promoting social inclusion and wider political transformation.
The workshop was organized around three broad themes:

1. Bread and Dignity: Political Economies and Women’s Lives

2. What’s in a Constitution? Political and Legal Strategies for Citizenship and Social Justice

3. Who’s Afraid of Shari’a? Islamic Feminism and Islamist Governance

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The Future of Disability Studies

The Future of Disability Studies

Project Director: Rachel Adams

The study of disability engages some of the most pressing debates of our time, questions about the beginning and end of life, prenatal testing, abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, accommodation in schools, public transportation and the workplace, technologies for the medical correction and “cure” of the non-normative body, disease, wartime injuries, post-traumatic stress, and healthcare. These questions could not be more relevant, given that people with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States, and that everyone who lives long enough will eventually become disabled. But beyond the numbers, the study of disability matters because it forces us to interrogate charged ethical and political questions about the meaning of aesthetics and cultural representation, bodily identity, and dynamics of social inclusion and/or exclusion.

The Future of Disability Studies approached disability as an embodied condition, a mutable historical phenomenon, and a social, political, and cultural identity; it explored some of the key debates within Disability Studies and identified new directions for the future of the field. Among other questions, this project's working group asked: How might we complicate the opposition between medical and social models of disability? What are the grounds for productive dialogue and intersection between Disability studies and Medical Humanities? How can we reconcile a commitment to the autonomy and self-representation of people with disabilities with the commitment to include people with the severest forms of intellectual and physical disability? How can Disability Studies further understand its relationship to other phenomena of embodied identity, such as race, ethnicity, and gender? How should Disability studies approach scientific developments in genetics, new reproductive technologies, augmentative communication devices, prosthetics etc.? How can the study of disability cast light on political debates over about healthcare, war, and education policy? And how is our consideration of these dynamics complicated and enhanced by putting them in historical and/or transnational perspective?

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Social Justice After the Welfare State

Social Justice After the Welfare State

Project Directors: Alice Kessler-Harris, Premilla Nadasen

Social Justice After the Welfare State explored the implications of the rise of neoliberalism and declining welfare state in the US and elsewhere for American politics, gender and race relations. Some of the questions the working group set out to explore included: Is the idea of government social responsibility at a dead end? How has the role of the state shifted between the New Deal and the current era of neoliberalism? Are democratic values threatened by limits on social rights? Will we see increased emphasis on marriage, family, and individual responsibility as the source of economic support? These initial questions broke down into a variety of disturbing issues that the working group also grappled with: How have the struggles for women’s equality and racial diversity contributed to progressive social change but also masked other forms of inequality? How do we think about citizenship and rights in relation to labor migration, incarceration, education, and new reproductive technologies such as surrogacy? Will expanded benefits such as “family-friendly” policies exacerbate divisions among workers and simply create a larger pool of poorly paid labor? Or will such strategies contribute to a rethinking of the meaning of workplace justice? What about labor unions? What alternative labor organizing strategies have enhanced the political power of workers?  What is the current state of social protest?  Are Americans turning inward and finding individual coping mechanisms?  Or are incipient movements a sign of emerging collective organization? Approaching its topic from a range of angles, the workshop cast its exploratory net on the impact of inequality on the future of American democracy. 

Workshop:  Shifting Notions of Social Citizenship: The “Two Wests” 
June 11-13, 2014
Columbia Global Center | Paris

The workshop examined the impact of the widespread decline of the welfare state on long-standing claims to social citizenship, and consider consequences for democratic participation in Europe, and in the United States. Over the course of the twentieth century, expanding welfare states, most effectively (though differently) modeled in Western Europe, helped to guarantee economic security. In the quest for a more inclusive social citizenship, nation-states variously subsidized education, housing and family maintenance, as well as unemployment insurance, old age pensions, minimum wages, labor standards, the dole, and health care.  These benefits or rights, helped to empower working people to participate in democratic governance.  But the “welfare state” is now at risk, under the onslaught of a persuasive 'free market' ideology and the spread of global economies that reduce the regulatory capacities of nation-states. And so the question: Can we imagine the perpetuation of democracy in the face of a transformed welfare state? Social scientists and historians from the United States and different European countries met to explore how the decline of the welfare state will affect present and future conceptions of citizenship and political participation.

With the support of:
Interuniversity Center for European-American History and Politics (CISPEA); Department of Human Studies, University of Eastern Piedmont; Department of History, Columbia University; and the Alliance Program, Columbia University

Beyond Neoliberalism: Social Justice After the Welfare State
Saturday, April 2, 2016
Columbia University

Social Justice After the Welfare State, a workshop led by Alice Kessler-Harris and Premilla Nadasen in  the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia, hosted a daylong symposium to  explore the transformation of the welfare state and social movements in the face of neoliberal  challenges. The group gathered considered the implications of this transformation for the political economy of class,  gender, racism, and migration. Putting scholars in conversation with activists who address the fallout of neoliberalism on the ground, the symposium assessed the past, present, and future of government social responsibility and pays special attention to social rights and social justice. 

With the support of:
Women Creating Change (Center for the Study of Social Difference); Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University; Department of History, Columbia University

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Science and Social Difference

Science and Social Difference

Project Director: Rebecca Jordan-Young

This working group considered a series of linked questions about the social, cultural, and scientific nature of the sexed and raced body. The governing bodies for international sporting competitions (such as the International Olympic Committee) released controversial new policies on who can compete in women's events. These policies, which were meant to ensure that competitors are both "female" and "feminine enough" to compete with other women athletes, provided an excellent focal point for exploring how an entangled and intersectional view of sex, gender, and other social formations might be relevant to contemporary matters of science and social policy. This project's broader goal was to use the specific focus on sex-testing of elite athletes as a lab for considering larger questions related to social difference and the intersections of scientific and sociocultural perspectives on the sexed and raced body.

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Borders and Boundaries

Borders and Boundaries

Project Directors: Claudio Lomnitz, Elizabeth Povinelli

The Borders & Boundaries project was a unique interdisciplinary working group of scholars interested in re-examining current ways of thinking about global migration and developing new ways of conceptualizing the sociological, historical, economic, political, aesthetic and gender-specific dimensions of human mobility and social difference. Borders & Boundaries had as its premise a double paradox of contemporary life:  the hardening of ethnic and racial boundaries at a time when goods and information flow across national borders quite freely, and the increasingly acute focus on racial differences at a time when race as a "scientific" or descriptive social category has become conspicuously unstable. The Borders and Boundaries project raised comparative questions concerning the ways in which international migrations - and border crossings of other kinds - relate to the formation and transformation of intra-societal boundaries such as race, class, gender and sexuality. Borders & Boundaries insisted that gender/race/sexuality/class must be at the foundation of any global thought initiative and that global concerns must be at the foundation of the study of gender/race/sexuality/class.

The Borders and Boundaries Working Group focuses on the relationship between international borders and social boundaries within national societies. The working group has as its premise a double paradox of contemporary life: the hardening of ethnic and racial boundaries at a time when goods and information flow across national borders quite freely, and the racialization of social relations at a time when racial theories have an awkward relation to scientific prestige, and racial categories have become conspicuously unstable. The Borders and Boundaries Working Group seeks to explore sociological, historical, political and aesthetic dimensions of the relationship between national borders and social boundaries in a comparative context.

In order to do so, we seek to shape an international research network that is committed to comparison. The working group has initiated with an institutional platform based at CSER and CCASD at Columbia, and at the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS) at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Additional institutional sites are currently being explored in Australia, Turkey, Mexico, and Germany. The Borders and Boundaries working group’s first concern was an interrogation of the connection between racial formation and immigration in the United States and France. It is currently developing that theme, and incorporating a new field of inquiry on boundary formation and indigeneity in national societies that were founded as settler colonies. In order to achieve conceptual clarity on the subject of immigration, settlement, and race, the Borders and Boundaries working group is interested in extending attention to boundary formation in areas of the world where migration is principally internal, such as China and India. The work of the Borders and Boundaries group began in 2007, when CSER hosted a panel discussion of racism in contemporary France, and its connection to the contemporary history of race in the United States. Didier Fassin, one of the project’s initiators, has proposed a special issue of the French history journal Annales as the project’s first collective publication. CCASD and CSER will be holding a first fully-fledged conference of the Borders and Boundaries working group at Columbia in the Fall of 2008. After that meeting, we plan to work in a sustained fashion for three years, inviting speakers, faculty fellows, and visiting fellows working in a variety of sites in order to produce a robust comparative discussion.

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Engendering the Archive

Engendering the Archive

Project Directors: Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Laura Wexler

Power determines what is conserved and what is lost, which stories have been committed to collective memory and which ones have been erased. Engendering the Archive brought this fundamental feminist insight to bear on the examination of archival practices in the arts, literature, history, social science and in the practice of everyday life. An interdisciplinary research project that consisted of working artists, documentarians, archivists, scholars, social analysts, and museum curators, Engendering the Archive explored the making of archives, specifically, the knowledge they afford and the question of what exceeds their grasp. This project stood out from other work on the archive because of its rigorous focus on the role of power in producing the archive and in positioning social groups unevenly in relation to the production of knowledge and the authority to speak.

Engendering the Archive was an interdisciplinary research project focusing on gender, sexuality, race, and archival practices. The working group looked at categories of social difference as inescapable aspects of differential power relations that determine what societies remember and what they forget. Focusing on key questions such as--What is an archive? Who or what authorizes its construction? How do archives contribute to the production of social and cultural difference? How does the development of new media radically change the way knowledge is classified, stored, and retrieved?—the project sought answers by taking advantage of theories and methods developed by contemporary artists, activists, and scholars of race, gender, and sexuality.

Engendering the Archive investigated some of these fundamental questions from a global perspective, taking into account of the role of racism and colonialism in the production of archives and of categories that make legible or erase particular events and experiences. Gender, along with race, sexuality, and class, are inescapable aspects of differential power relations that determine what societies remember and what they forget.

Participants included approximately 30 scholars, activists and cultural practitioners drawn from Columbia, from other colleges and universities in the greater New York area, and from abroad, as well as several Columbia graduate students.

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