DISCUSSION: Is Gender Violence Governable? A Panel on International Feminist Regulation
“Over the last few decades Violence Against Women (VAW) and, increasingly, Gender Based Violence (GBV), have come to prominence as sites for activism,” explained Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science and Co-Director of the CSSD project on “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence.”
In her introductory remarks to “Is Gender Violence Governable? A Panel on International Feminist Regulation,” Abu-Lughod asked “ How can we engage critically with the terms, assumptions, funding streams, policies, and politics that have underwritten this unprecedented outpouring of attention? What is left out when problems both in war and in peace are framed in particular ways that become a kind of common sense? And whose interests are served by such framings?”
The event at Columbia University offered compelling responses to many of Abu-Lughod’s questions. Inaugurating a two-year initiative on Reframing Gendered Violence headed up by the Women Creating Change project at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, the discussion was co-sponsored by the Dean of the Humanities, the Columbia Global Centers, and the Henry Luce Foundation.
Dubravka Žarkov, Professor of Gender, Conflict & Development at the International Institute of Social Studies at The Hague, opened with a paper entitled “Feminist Politics, War Rapes, and Global Governance.” “What is ‘gender,’ and what does it mean in relation to wars and armed conflicts?” Žarkov asked audience members as a lead-in to her critique of Western feminism’s vexed treatment of war crimes and gendered violence.
Tracing the historical elevation of war rape to the position of ultimate violence against women, Žarkov worried that UN resolutions such as 1325 (2000) have enabled the resurgence of colonialist narratives about victims and savages. “Can we really claim that all this injustice is perpetuated against our will?” she challenged her listeners.
Rema Hammami, Professor of Anthropology at Birzeit University, discussed related themes in fieldwork conducted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Like Žarkov, Hammami interrogated the effects of UN Resolution 1325. In Palestine, she explained, the resolution encouraged practices of data collection and statistical analysis that disproportionately revealed forms of violence enacted against women, while obscuring the more pervasive violence of settler colonialism.
Janet Halley, Royall Professor of Law at Harvard University opened a Q & A sesssion by highlighting Žarkov’s and Hammami’s shared insistence on bringing feminist critical capacities to bear on the relatively new involvement of feminists in systems of international law and governance. She fielded insightful questions on topics ranging from methods of data collection to the misleading packaging of gender equality initiatives as projects on Violence Against Women.
The conversation continues on Thursday, November 3, with presentations by Professors Dina Siddiqi and Nacira Guénif-Souilamas on “Framing Religion and Gender Violence: Beyond the Muslim Question.”
See photos from the discussion here.
Contributed by Liza McIntosh
Frances Negrón-Muntaner on CBS Sunday Morning Discussing "Latinos and the Vote"
Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and director of the CSSD project on Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy, appeared on a CBS Sunday Morning program about "Latinos and the Vote."
In discussing the current presidential election and the debates over immigration, Negrón-Muntaner said that there is a sense that Latinos have come to the United States mainly as recent immigrants but in fact, “Latinos began their life as part of the United States, when the United States crossed over to Latin America in search of territory."
Watch the whole interview and program here.
China and Africa at a Crossroads: Revisiting the Legacy of Bandung Humanisms
CSSD's Bandung Humanisms working group presents a panel discussion on "China and Africa at a Crossroads: Revisiting the Legacy of Bandung Humanisms" on October 24, 2016, from 1-5:30 p.m. at the Heyman Center Common Room, Columbia University.
Distinguished scholars Rebecca Karl, Associate Professor of History, NYU ; Jamie Monson, Director, African Studies, Michigan State University; Stephanie Rupp, Asssitant Professor of Anthropology, CUNY-Lehman; Barry Sautman, Professor, Division of Social Sciences, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology; Hairong Yan, Anthropologist, Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University; and Duncan Yoon, Assistant Professor of English, University of Alabama will be in conversation with Howard French, Associate Professor of Journalism at Columbia; Stathis Gourgouris, Professor of Comparative Literature, ICLS; Lydia H. Liu, Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, MESAAS
This workshop will examine the unfolding historical relationship between China and Africa, as part of an ongoing working group devoted to the study of the Legacy of Bandung Humanisms. The Bandung Humanisms working group is interested in the vast, disaggregated landscape of creative elaboration and political, social, and cultural thinking, including current constellations that would be unthinkable without the Bandung legacy.
The Bandung Humanisms working group is interested in the vast, disaggregated landscape of creative elaboration and political, social, and cultural thinking, including current constellations that would be unthinkable without the Bandung legacy. The project endeavors to show that since its inception, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization and the Non-Aligned Movement have cited the humanism and self-determination of Bandung.
Rachel Adams Publishes Article about Japanese Massacre and Ambivalence Toward People With Disabilities
Rachel Adams, CSSD Director, Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University, and director of the CSSD project on Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture, recently published an article in the Independent on the universal ambivalence toward people with disabilities.
Citing the largely unacknowledged July stabbing deaths of 19 people in a home for the disabled outside of Tokyo, Adams writes that "The practice of warehousing people with disabilities sends a message that they are less than human."
According to Adams, while people with disabilities gain more rights and are increasingly more visible, they continue to face prejudice, social isolation, and violence. Stigmatization leads to institutionalization, but "In truth, disability is an aspect of ordinary experience that touches all people and all families at some point in the cycle of life," writes Adams.
Read the full article here.
Josef Sorett Interviewed about "Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics"
Josef Sorett, Associate Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Columbia University and former CSSD executive committee member, was featured in an interview on the African American Intellectual History Society blog.
Sorett's recently published book Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics offers an account of the ways in which religion, especially Afro-Protestantism, remained pivotal to the ideas and aspirations of African American literature across much of the twentieth century.
The interview claims that Sorett's book "reveals religion to be an essential ingredient, albeit one that was always questioned and contested, in the forging of an African American literary tradition."
Read the interview here.
Alice Kessler-Harris Receives American Historical Association Award
Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History Emerita of American History at Columbia University and director of the CSSD project on "Social Justice After the Welfare State," recently received an American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction to senior historians for lifetime achievement.
Kessler-Harris specializes in the history of American labor and the comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of women and gender.
Reframing Gendered Violence Group Holds "Is Gender Violence Governable? A Panel on International Feminist Regulation" on October 13th
On Thursday, October 13th, CSSD presents "Is Gender Violence Governable?: A Panel on International Feminist Regulation" at 4:15 p.m. in 203 Butler Library. This is the first event in a two-year series called Reframing Gendered Violence, which is part of the Women Creating Change initiative supported by the Dean of the Humanities and the Columbia Global Centers. Reframing Gendered Violence is also linked to the project on Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence, which is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Dubravka Zarkov, Associate Professor of Gender, Conflict and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, will present on "Feminist Politics, War Rapes, and Global Governance" and Rema Hammami, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, Birzeit, OPT, will present on "Follow the Numbers: Global Governmentality and the Domestic Violence Agenda." Janet Halley, Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, will serve as discussant.
Reframing Gendered Violence is an international collaboration between scholars, artists and activists that aims to recast the way violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) are 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.
The second event in the series, “Framing Religion and Gender Violence: Beyond the Muslim Question,” takes place on November 3rd, also at 203 Butler Library. Further events this year include “Refugees and Gender Violence: Vulnerability and Resistance” and “Refugees and Gender Violence: Media and the Arts” and “Reframing Gendered Violence: Indigenous Women’s Voices” in the following academic year.
See the Facebook page for this event here.
Precision Medicine Working Group Presents Aditya Bharadwaj, October 13, on "Cultivated Cures: Ethnographic Encounters with Contentious Stem Cell Regenerations in India"
CSSD's Precision Medicine working group presents Aditya Bharadwaj, Research Professor, The Graduate Institute, Geneva, on "Cultivated Cures: Ethics, Politics, and Culture Ethnographic Encounters with Contentious Stem Cell Regenerations in India" on October 13th, 2016 from 5-7 p.m. at 754 Schermerhorn Extension.
The lecture seeks to conceptualize how we might understand a scene of chronic and progressively pathological affliction as a site for witnessing the anatomy of a cultured and cultivated cure from within the emergent field of regenerative medicine. The argument seeks to probe how this allows us to see a progressive and aggressive affliction as paradoxically regenerating in the face of curative operations that end up maintaining a tenuous truce, a dormant zone that can be imagined as health. This fleeting ‘health’ wedged precariously between a cultivated cure and a regenerating affliction offers fascinating insights into the emerging world of stem cell therapeutics.
The event is free and open to the public. Columbia University is committed to creating an environment that includes and welcomes people with disabilities. If you need accommodations because of a disability, please email Liz Bowen, at elb2157@columbia.edu, at least two weeks in advance.
Rachel Adams Directs New CSSD Group Addressing the Ethical, Cultural, Political, and Historical Questions Around Precision Medicine
CSSD is initiating a broad-based exploration of questions raised by precision medicine—an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person—in such fields as law, ethics, social sciences, and the humanities.
Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture will be the first project of its kind to bring faculty from the humanities, social sciences, law, and medicine into dialogue with leading scholars from the United States and abroad to discuss how humanistic questions might enhance the understanding of the ethical, social, legal, and political implications of precision medicine research. A series of workshops and lectures will explore the mutual benefits to humanists, social scientists, researchers, and clinicians of serious interdisciplinary engagement with this emerging medical field.
The next event, on Thursday, October 13, 2016, from 5-8 p.m. at 754 Schermerhorn Extension, is a discussion with Dr. Aditya Bharadawaj, Professor of Anthropology and the Sociology of Development at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, on "Local and Global Dimensions of Precision Medicine."
Rachel Adams, CSSD Director and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University will direct the project with support from Columbia’s Humanities Initiative.
Topics the project plans to address include how the use of genetic information changes understandings of self, agency, health, embodiment and ability; how precision medicine might intersect with the movement for patients’ and disability rights; historical perspectives that may illuminate the development of precision medicine in the present; how cross-cultural understandings of medicine, health, and ability might contribute to Euro-American approaches to precision medicine; how precision medicine might change the ways care is given and received; how precision medicine is understood by popular media; and the benefits and drawbacks of a “big data” approach to research and treatment.
CSSD’s project is part of Columbia’s larger overall Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to establish the university as the center for scholarship relating to precision medicine and society. In 2014 Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger announced a University-wide initiative to address the vast potential for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease based on the genomic and other data that precision medicine provides.
Lila Abu-Lughod Directs New Project on "Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence"
CSSD is housing a new three-year initiative on "Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence," to be co-directed by Professor Lila Abu-Lughod (Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality/Anthropology). Launched with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, this project will bring together an international community of scholars, experts, journalists, and activists to study the role of religion in naming, framing, and governing gendered violence, with a special focus on the Middle East and South Asia.
Over the past couple of decades, concerns about violence against women (VAW)––and the more expansive “gender-based violence” (GBV)–– have become prominent and highly visible in a range of local, national, and global agendas. By embedding gender violence in a complex matrix of international norms, legal sanctions, and humanitarian aid, the anti-VAW movement has achieved a powerful international “common sense” measure for defining and attending to violence against women in developing countries, particularly during conflict situations. The adverse effect has been to detach victims from their full contexts when determining what counts as VAW and how it should be addressed.
“A concern for women in war too often prioritizes their rape over their death,” explains project co-director Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who also serves as the Director of the Gender Studies Program at Mada Al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Research in Haifa. “This narrowing of VAW to attacks on women’s bodily integrity excludes economic, political and structural forms of violence, thereby leaving women’s calls for safe homes, safe public spaces, and stable governments unheeded.”
Abu-Lughod notes that religious traditions and institutions are regularly linked to VAW (whether as explanations or solutions) through media representations, by national governments, and in international governance and yet there is very little examination of the terms under which those linkages occur.
“The most infamous example of the conflation of religion and VAW for geo-political ends was the Bush II administration’s use of Afghani women’s suffering at the hands of the Taliban as a part of its casus belli with Afghanistan,” explains Rema Hammami, another co-director of the project, who is based at the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine. “Yet, the VAW agenda also operates in less dramatic ways. In the Palestinian context, the global VAW agenda has become one measure that global institutions are using to assess the Palestinian leadership’s ethical capacity for statehood.”
The CSSD initiative opens a critical global conversation on religion and gender violence, with the conviction that more nuanced analyses could lead to more effective ways to meet women’s and men’s actual needs and circumstances in different national contexts.
Janet Jakobsen, a Barnard College co-director of the research group adds, “We will work with journalists and writers to transform some of the ‘common sense’ stories about VAW/GBV.” A fellowship competition for journalists who report on global issues related to gender violence will open in October.
“It is urgent that feminist scholars and practitioners in diverse global locations learn from each other not just about strategies or policies for decreasing violence, but also about the ways that framing problems in certain ways may cloud the very diagnoses that are so essential to treating human suffering,” says Abu-Lughod.
The initiative will launch this fall with two public panels featuring feminist scholars from Bangladesh, France, Palestine, and the Netherlands speaking on two themes: “Is Violence Against Women Governable?” (October 13) and “Beyond the Muslim Question” (November 3).
"Concept Histories of the Urban" Workshop Concludes Gender and the Global Slum Project
“Concept Histories of the Urban” was the final meeting of the CSSD working group Gender and the Global Slum. The two-day workshop on September 16-17, 2016 was organized by by Anupama Rao and Casey Primel, and supported by CSSD, the Center for the Study of Science and Society, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities.
Described by Rao as an experiment in interdisciplinary and inter-regional comparisons and connections, the workshop focused on relating work on urbanizing processes outside of the West with the historical experience of the United States, and the relationship between race, space and social segregation in particular. As participant Andrew Herscher suggested, “The urban is producing concept histories,” thus prompting a rethinking of what constitutes the urban and what is distinctive about the urban.
In the first session “Violence and Visibility”, participants discussed papers by Ana Paulina Lee, Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University, and Mabel Wilson, Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Lee’s paper on the spatial (re)configurations of race during Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans and Wilson’s contribution about the political potential of tent cities allowed for discussions of how political claims can be made in various urban contexts.
Participants then discussed papers by Nasser Abourahme, Doctoral Candidate in the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department, Columbia University, and by Anooradha Siddiqi, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at the Gallatin School, New York University. Both papers dealt with camps; Abourahme explored the genealogy and political technology of the camp, and Siddiqi questioned why a complex in the periphery of Kenya has remained invisible despite substantial physical presence. The camp, with all its connotations of precarity, also raises issues of permanence, settlement, and home.
Anupama Rao and Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Associate Professor of Social Science and Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies and Urban Administration at New York Institute of Technology, elaborated the theme of home. Bloom’s contribution outlined the power and weaknesses of the term “affordable housing” in the context of New York City, and Rao explored the connections between Chicago and Bombay through the concepts of home and and "unhousing" in both cities.
Participants continued discussing the theme of unhousing with papers by Debjani Bhattacharyya, Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University, and by Andrew Herscher, Associate Professor of Architecture, History of Art, and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Their contributions on the regulation of speculation in colonial Calcutta and on blight in Detroit, respectively, prompted discussion about discourses of housing rights and the relationships between speculation, blight, and enterprise.
The next session focused on “Valuation and Financialization.” Adrienne Brown, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, wrote about appraisal as a process of subjectivity becoming scientific and intersecting with race in the context of the property market. Casey Primel, Volkswagen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, Harvard University, and Aarti Sethi, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, both explored the relationship between the rural and the urban. Primel elucidated how land became an object of financial calculation in Egypt and Sethi explored the concept of primitive accumulation in the context of new kinds of agriculture in India.
The second day of the workshop began with a discussion of a paper by Anthony Acciavatti, Fellow in the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, and a published article by Jonathan Bach, Associate Professor and Chair, Global Studies Program, at The New School. Acciavatti discussed the tubewell as a substitute for the state in the Ganges Basin in India and Bach’s article showed the significance of infrastructure as a political tool in China. These papers led to broader discussions about the relationship between infrastructure and the urban, and the politics and social life that surround infrastructure.
Carlos Forment, Associate Professor of Sociology at The New School, raised the issue of citizenship more explicitly with his paper about the notion of "plebeian citizenship" among scavengers in Buenos Aires. The theme of labor continued with a presentation by Rachel Sturman, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College, about the concept of "skill" as relating to skilled and unskilled labor in Mumbai. Laura Diamond Dixit, Doctoral Candidate in Architectural History and Theory at Columbia University, elucidated the importance of climate to the laborer as she vividly described the violence of heat on construction labor in the Persian Gulf.
During the final session, Laura Kurgan, Associate Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Director of the Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University, and Dare Brawley, Program Administrator at the Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University, presented their mapping of destruction in Aleppo as part of the “Conflict Urbanism: Aleppo” project at the Center for Spatial Research. This presentation sparked a lively discussion about the potential uses of these maps, the politics behind mapping, and how to make the methodological issues of mapping more transparent to users.
The workshop showcased how connecting projects across time and space can help illuminate shared concepts and forms of urbanism. The recent “spatial turn” in scholarship has demonstrated the importance and value of space to thinking about key issues in the humanities and social sciences, and this workshop highlighted how much remains to be elaborated about what makes something urban and the impacts of the urban on political and social life.
Contributed by Laura Yan
CSSD Releases 2015-16 Annual Report
The Center for the Study of Social Difference recently released its annual report for 2015-16. The report announced the successful conclusion of The Future of Disabilities Studies project, The Digital Black Atlantic project, and Women Mobilizing Memory. Four new projects—Precision Medicine: Ethics, Culture, and Politics; Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy; Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence; and Reframing Gendered Violence—were established.
The report announces that projects secured funds from the Luce Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Columbia University Humanities Initiative, and the Columbia Center for Science and Society.
View the report here.
JUST PUBLISHED: "Vulnerability in Resistance" Edited by Judith Butler and CSSD Project Members Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay
The volume Vulnerability in Resistance, which grew out of the workshop "Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change" that took place at Columbia's Global Center in Istanbul in 2013, has been published by Duke University Press. The introduction to the volume is available here, free of charge.
The book was edited by Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley; Zeynep Gambetti, Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogaziçi University; and Leticia Sabsay, Assistant Professor in the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It contains contributions from Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Basak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, and Elena Tzelepis.
In the introduction, the editors write that vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. The book examines political movements in Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, articulating an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency and consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, and resistance to authority, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner Appears on HBO's "Habla y Vota"
Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and Project Director for CSSD's project on "Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy" recently appeared on an episode of HBO Latino's "Habla y Vota" discussing Latinos' influence on U.S. politics.
Negrón-Muntaner said that while voting is important, Latinos also influence American politics with their imagination and creativity, two things necessary for affecting change.
Watch the full episode here.