Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture
Precision Medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person. Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture (2016-19) examines the ethical, legal, and political implications of precision medicine research.
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 (2013-16) was a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary working group that came together to invent a scholarly resource and digital platform for multimedia explorations and documentations of literary texts, visual documents, sites, moments, rituals and ceremonies, monuments and memorials, performances, and material objects emerging out of and concerning the Black Atlantic world.
The 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 (2013-20) explored the politics of memory in the aftermath of the atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in comparative global perspective. The international working group analyzed the strategies by which women artists, scholars and activists have succeeded in mobilizing the memory of gender-based violence to promote redress, social justice, and a democratic future.
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
Bread and Dignity: Political Economies and Women’s Lives
What’s in a Constitution? Political and Legal Strategies for Citizenship and Social Justice
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 (2013-16) engaged ethical and political questions about the beginning and end of life, prenatal testing, abortion, euthanasia, eugenics, technologies for the medical correction and “cure” of the non-normative body, disease, wartime injuries, post-traumatic stress, and healthcare, as well as the dynamics of social inclusion and/or exclusion.
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 (2013-16) explored the implications of the declining welfare state for global politics, gender and race relations, and the future of democracy, imagining alternative models of life and new ways of thinking about the politics of the present.
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 (2013-14) considered a series of linked questions about the social, cultural, and scientific nature of the sexed and raced body. The project used 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. Sex-testing provides 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.
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
The Borders & Boundaries project re-examined current ways of thinking about global migration and sought to develop new ways of conceptualizing the sociological, historical, economic, political, aesthetic and gender-specific dimensions of human mobility and social difference. The 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 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
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 (2008-15) brought this fundamental feminist insight to bear on the examination of archival practices in the arts, literature, history, social science and everyday life.
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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Liberalism's Others
Combining humanistic methods to understand the meanings people attribute to their lives, including the concepts and categories that animate them, and ethnographic and analytical methods developed in the social sciences to track the relationships between individuals and institutions of governance, economic forces, and global dynamics, "Liberalism and its Others" (2008-2011) brought together dynamic groups of historians, anthropologists, scholars of literature, law, politics, and health to explore alternative models of life and to develop new ways of thinking about the politics of the present.
Liberalism's Others
Project Directors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Elizabeth Povinelli, Anupama Rao
Liberalism's Others (2008-2011) used the knowledges and practices of those marginalized in liberal or liberalizing polities in order to understand liberalism not as it imagines itself but as it is practiced. Combining humanistic methods to understand the meanings people attribute to their lives, including the concepts and categories that animate them, and ethnographic and analytical methods developed in the social sciences to track the relationships between individuals and institutions of governance, economic forces, and global dynamics, "Liberalism and its Others" brought together dynamic groups of historians, anthropologists, scholars of literature, law, politics, and health to explore alternative models of life and to develop new ways of thinking about the politics of the present. This group of scholars drew on the deep intellectual resources of Columbia University, but also collaborated closely with colleagues in Turkey, India, the UK and elsewhere, who have interests in exploring new social and political formations in the aftermath of decolonization and in the wake of neoliberal regimes.
This project sought to better understand how and why, across various transformations in form and ideology, liberal markets, political formations, and law continue to focus—and depend—on the illiberal and the different “other.” The group examined the ways that liberalism has historically opposed the normative subject to the “politically inadequate” subject stigmatized by religion, culture, race, gender, or sexual difference, exploring questions such as, "How do such “others” continue to be salient in local and global forms of liberal reform?" Through case studies of particular regions and specific biosocial domains, we asked how liberal and neoliberal economic, state, and legal transformations produce and rely on social difference.
In a range of critical literatures--from those that examine the dark side of humanitarianism in colonial settings and human rights regimes in the present to those that uncover the legitimating functions of democratic reform or track the disjunctions created by global transformations such as the rise of Chinese economic power or the shifting of global economic flows to southern circuits--the pivotal role of social difference in the discourses and practices of power is clear. The emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s, for instance, relied on the stigmatization of the “black welfare mother” in the U.S. and of the immigrant in Britain (where the working class was also vilified). Since then, in the US, Europe, and Australia, the immigrant, homosexual, and class radical have helped prop up conservative movements even as these neoliberal movements position themselves as the bulwark against the Islamic, colonial, and terrorist “other.” The challenge to secular states by some Christian and Muslim groups has simultaneously destabilized secularism as the self-evident mode of governmentality and provoked a complicated set of discourses and practices around liberal tolerance.
This project sought to understand how liberal and neoliberal economic, state, and legal transformations both produce and rely on social difference even as the content of that difference shifts. Through comparative engagement with case studies of particular regions and specific biosocial domains this group explored the sometimes incommensurate relationship between the representations of liberalism and facts on the ground.
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TOWARD AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF BLACK WOMEN
This research project was dedicated to recovering the history of black women as active intellectual subjects and to moving the study of black thought, culture, and leadership beyond the "Great Men" paradigm that characterizes most accounts of black intellectual activity, thus challenging the traditionally male dominated accounts of intellectual work.
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women
Project Directors: Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Barbara D. Savage
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women was a research project dedicated to recovering the history of black women as active intellectual subjects and to moving the study of black thought, culture, and leadership beyond the "Great Men" paradigm that characterizes most accounts of black intellectual activity. This project sought to define and promote black women's intellectual history as a legitimate field of academic inquiry, and in so doing to generate compelling scholarship that challenges the traditionally male dominated accounts of intellectual work. A collaborative effort designed to support the development of the next generation of scholars in this field, Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women examined the perception and construction of black intellectual leadership as male and African-American women's contributions to black thought, political mobilization, creative work and gender theory. This project also sought to create and sustain a community of scholars, nurture and mentor junior professors and graduate students, and help develop the leadership skills of young women.
In an effort to move the study of black thought, culture, and leadership beyond the “Great Men” paradigm that characterizes most accounts of black intellectual activity, we have initiated this three year research project. The goal of this project is to address the lack of attention given to the work of black women intellectuals historically and in the contemporary moment. In doing so we hope to challenge the perception and construction of black intellectual leadership as male and to explore African-American women’s contributions to black thought, political mobilization, creative work, gender theory and identity politics. In the course of the three-year project, we aim to generate a body of innovative scholarship on black women intellectuals that maps the distinctive ways in which black women have engaged and challenged the ideas of both white American intellectual traditions and the racial and political ideas of black male thinkers. Designed to support the development of the next generation of scholars in this field, our project brings together scholars at different stages in their careers. With this end in mind, we hosted a preliminary brainstorming meeting in the spring of 2006. Twenty-two scholars attended this first meeting. Participants assessed the state of the field today, shared descriptions of their individual research projects and set goals for the outcome of the project. We plan to convene more times over a period of three years to address this tremendous void in the field of African American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, African Studies, American Studies and American History. In the first year of the project we will hold a day long symposium for participants of the April meeting to share their works in progress. The following summer we plan to host a week long workshop that will focus on finalizing drafts for a volume on Black Women’s Intellectual History. In the third year of the project we plan to host an international public conference. Participants, members of the working group as well as those who have responded to a call for papers, will present their work to the larger public. Following the conference we plan to gather some of the essays for publication. We will also include sample syllabi and reading lists in the appendices. During the course of this working group we hope to encourage and generate scholarship on black women as intellectuals. Working as a collective, we hope to piece together a history of black women’s thought and culture, that examines the distinctive concerns and historical forces that have shaped black women’s ideas and intellectual activities. To this end, we are interested in subjects such as the genealogy of black feminism, the patterns of women’s leadership and theological commitments in the black church, the politics of black women’s literature, and the history of black women’s racial thought. In addition to assembling the collection of essays that will appear in our volume, we want to provide intellectual support for individual projects, to help the development and creation of courses and syllabi and most importantly, encourage the work of younger scholars in this area. Our project aims to define and promote black women’s intellectual history as a field, and in so doing to generate compelling scholarship that challenges the traditionally male dominated accounts of intellectual work. We also believe that in taking on this important and much neglected subject we will help to create and sustain a community of scholars, nurture and mentor junior professors and graduate students and help to develop the leadership skills of young women.
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Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change
This project brought together a wide range of feminist scholars who work on the problem of women, vulnerability, and social change with an eye to understanding both the risks of establishing women as a vulnerable population, the tactical deployment of the status of vulnerability, and the promise of developing new modes of collective agency that do not deny vulnerability as a resource.
Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change
Director: Judith Butler
This project brought together a wide range of feminist scholars who work on the problem of women, vulnerability, and social change with an eye to understanding both the risks of establishing women as a vulnerable population (especially when, according to nationalist norms, some women are regarded as vulnerable, and minority women are not), the tactical deployment of the status of vulnerability, and the promise of developing new modes of collective agency that do not deny vulnerability as a resource. It considered both the power differential and modes of agency among women that mobilize vulnerability within tactics of resistance. In other words, this group sought to understand global practices of social change that emerge from conditions of social and economic vulnerability, and that demonstrate the relation between vulnerability and political agency. Topics included a gendered analysis of war, literacy and education, and economic precarity and inequality, with the hope of identifying sites of social vulnerability and modes of social change. A goal of the project was to bring together artists, critics, and philosophers who offer theoretical perspectives on the sources of social change, focusing on modes of alliance that are characterized by interdependency and public action. The group also asked about the gendering of perceived or marked vulnerabilities and how they function to expand or justify those structures of power that seek to achieve ethnic, economic or cultural-religious dominance in specific social contexts.
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