Celebrating 50 Years of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life
A daylong symposium bringing together scholars, critics, musicians, and composers to reflect on the album’s insights into life in the wake of civil rights and decolonial movements across the African world, and on the legacies of Wonder’s hopeful vision of a future grounded in love and shared humanity.
Following the symposium, CSSD is proud to co-present, along with Pique-nique and Boom Collective, a concert featuring musician Elliott Skinner. Organized as part of Pique-nique’s “Take Two” series, the concert will feature a listening session of Wonder’s album followed by a reinterpretation by Skinner. Blending soul, blues, folk, and rock, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Elliott Skinner creates music that combines atmospheric vocals and rich instrumentation with an emphasis on personal storytelling. His work draws from the Black Radical Music Tradition, a lineage of Black artists who have used music to explore identity, confront social realities, and imagine new possibilities for freedom.
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.
Past Events
Poet, musician, filmmaker, actor and intellectual Saul Williams discusses the relationships between aesthetic forms and political education in conversation with Dr. Shana Redmond, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference. Reflecting on practices of Black experimentation—in language, music, and film—this dialogue explores the various sites of enclosure and foreclosure, from the nation state to the university, that bear upon the present and what practices are necessary to enact more just futures.
This conversation is the second installment of the University in/and Crisis working group, a collaboration between the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study at Teachers College, and is supported by The Radio in the Orchard. It is presented as part of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures's Black On Screen: A Century of Radical Visual Culture, a centennial series capturing 100 years of local and transnational Black movement work and artistic evolution on film.
On this walk, we will learn about Harlem’s storied role in the movement against systemic injustice, including police violence.
Join Us for an Evening of Music and Community!
The Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University invites you to celebrate the launch of our yearlong program Countering the Carceral State. Inspired by Malcolm X's internationalist insights and in line with CSSD's thematic focus in 2025-2026 on crisis, the program explores interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad. Program events will probe continuities between policing, racial profiling, and police militarization; the prison industrial complex; immigrant detention; forever wars in the Middle East and Central Asia; and the transformation of war zones like Gaza into technological testbeds.
5:30 PM - Shabazz Center Tour and Opening Drinks
Our event will begin with a drinks reception and guided tour of the historic Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center.
Event seating begins at 6:15 pm.
6:30 PM - Archive Unveiling
We will then follow the tour with a Malcolm X audiovisual archive presented by renowned scholar Sohail Daulatzai (UC Irvine).
7:30 - Concert Vijay Iyer and Wadada Smith: Defiant Life
We will cap off the evening with an live concert featuring the acclaimed duo of Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith performing their album Defiant Life.
We look forward to seeing you there. Drinks and seating are first come first served. Make sure to get your ticket and arrive early to guarantee your entry.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Music, and is in collaboration with the Institute for Research in African American Studies and the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University.
Seeds from a Seed's Perspective: A Lecture & Discussion with Eric Sanderson
Insights on the Movement of Plant Propagules by Indigenous People, Other People, and Others in the Landscape that became New York (Welikia)
Eric Sanderson has been working for nearly twenty-five years to understand the historical ecology of New York City, deriving insights relevant to conservation, urban planning, resilience, and epistemological issues, such as: what does it mean to be a New Yorker? How do you get here? How do you get away? Here we take the seed’s perspective on these questions and examine the processes by which we can understand the historical landscape before New York, what it meant for seeds and their movement, and how those movements changed in a landscape long stewarded by the Indigenous Lenape people to one controlled by the Dutch and English settlers to the our modern American metropolis.
Register here
