An interdisciplinary research center supporting collaborative projects that address gender, race, sexuality, and other intersecting forms of global inequality.
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CSSD supports working groups, hosts events, and produces public scholarship on social difference.
On the occasion of myriad anniversaries that offer occasions for taking stock, including that of U.S. independence, CSSD has launched a new thematic focus on Renaissance for 2026-2027.
CSSD has completed our 2025-2026 thematic focus on Crisis in recognition of the manifold crises we inhabit today. Out of this, we initiated the event series, Countering the Carceral State, to host discussions around the crises of disciplinary enforcement at home and abroad.
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The intertwined histories of human settlement and plants amid cultural and climatic change serve as the point of orientation in the new, eclectic essay collection Seeds of Diaspora. Its works follow seeds as they bear witness to migration, resilience, and transformation. Five contributors from this collection will discuss their investigations, which consider dramatic, even if subtle, changes. The conversation will range from postwar landscapes reclaimed by plant life to cultural landscapes overwritten by city planners; seeds in glacial ice to those carried along routes of labor and exile; and trees appropriated as constituents of fictive homelands to plants as sentient beings. The contributors recognize seeds both as biological and analogical subjects, and ask how we might reconceive the relationships between human and more-than-human.