ART EXHIBIT: "Die Presse" Reviews "Mobilizing Memory" in Vienna
Vienna's "Die Presse" reviewed the "Mobilizing Memory" exhibit that was created by the CSSD working group Women Mobilizing Memory and launched in Istanbul in 2014.
“‘Mobilizing Memory:’ Armenian Women Who Don’t Forget”
Anne-Catherine Simon (March 31, 2015, Die Presse)
“Mobilizing Memory” shows how women use memory to practice resistance to oppression: a politically charged show in Vienna.
They’re called Saturday Mothers. Every Saturday for twenty years, women have been standing on the street, in Galatasaray or in another Turkish square. They hold up pictures of their sons. Or their husbands. They are officially counted as missing; in reality, they were murdered for political reasons.
“The mothers’ tenacity in witnessing to this is the strongest form of resistance,” says Işın Önol. The artist comes from Istanbul and has lived in Vienna for five years. Here she has organized a powerful exhibition about forms of female, and sometimes publically celebrated, memory. “Mobilizing Memory” will be on display through Friday and could hardly leave the viewer cold. The piece by Argentinian-born Silvina Der-Meguerditchian was developed specifically for the Vienna show and especially is noteworthy, just weeks before the memorial day marking the deportation of Armenian intellectuals from Istanbul 100 years ago, the beginning of the murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Armenian descendants of survivors living in Vienna knitted together their old family photos—literally, with wool—into a kind of Anatolian carpet. On the white screen that comprises the back side of the piece is a video showing the women in the midst of this collaborative memory work. The photos show families together before the camera, who were never together again after the genocide. The family of the artist also shared this fate; Silvina Der-Meguerditchian is the granddaughter of displaced Armenians.
Memory Work in Vienna
The knitwork shows one of the unique aspects of this exhibition – it not only depicts memory, but also generated memory in its workshops. How does it affect a people with no national memory culture, like the Kurds? On akakurdistan.com, Susan Meiselas has tried for years to fill in these gaps. For “Mobilizing Memory,” she also held a workshop with women from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. “In Vienna we continued collecting,” says Önol. Denise Sözen in turn interviewed residents of the Armenian neighborhood in Los Angeles.
The exhibit was already on display in a similar form in Istanbul, the idea of which came from a feminist research project by American and Turkish academics. “I like using the image of the unbroken camera,” says curator Işın Önol. “When political violence takes place in public spaces in Turkey, the story usually is, ‘unfortunately, the security camera was broken when it happened.’ For me, the witnesses are unbroken cameras.”
“Mobilizing Memory.” On display until Friday, April 3, in the Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Währingerstraße 59, Vienna 1090.
Translation: Alyssa Greene
SYMPOSIUM: Caribbean Queer Visualities, April 2-3, 2015, Co-sponsored by Digital Black Atlantic Project
Caribbean Queer Visualities, co-sponsored by the CCSD working group the Digital Black Atlantic Project, reflects on and stimulates the production of creative and critical work that takes seriously the emergence of heterodox personal and public identities, identities that breach or subvert or evade the heteronormativities of colonial and postcolonial modes of being and self-expression. Growing in part out of a concern about the catastrophes of sexual othering, not to say sexual violence, so rampant in the Caribbean, the conference asks whether or to what extent “queer” offers a way of understanding the contemporary in Caribbean visual art practice, and in scholarly considerations of this practice. Why is it imperative for Caribbean cultural workers—intellectuals and artists—to think about the efficacy of “queer”? What might thinking through “queer” illuminate about the contemporary in Caribbean art practice?
The conference is open to the public and the schedule is available here.
Thursday April 2, 2015, 5pm - 8pm, 754 Schermerhorn Hall Extension
Friday April 3, 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, 963 Schermerhorn Hall Extension
Participants:
Writers: Terri Francis, Maja Horn, Rosamond S. King, Angelique V. Nixon, Jerry Philogene.
Artists: Richard Fung, Jorge Pineda, Charl Landvreugd, Nadia Huggins, Jean-Ulrick Désert
Remarks by Kellie Jones, Associate Professor, Art History and Archeology, Columbia University
WOMEN MOBILIZING MEMORY: Effective Activism for Human Rights
CSSD’s Women Mobilizing Memory working group met in late February to discuss, in a comparative perspective, the links between memory and activism and between memory practices and movements promoting human rights.
Examining current protest movements in the wake of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, members engaged in sustained debate about whether, and in what circumstances, such protests are useful in mobilizing people for sustained activist efforts at social transformation.
Among the aesthetic tools that might mobilize memory for progressive social change are the digital arts and photography, performance, and media, each of which can have strong ties to human rights law and academic examinations of inequality and the systematic erasure of memory.
The group suggested that while street protest was perhaps the most visible venue of mobilization, it was often overly romanticized and could not be sustained indefinitely. Still, the action of individuals coming together to claim a civil space has proved to be a useful tool for fomenting social and political transformation, as we saw in the frequent civil rights and peace protests of the 1960’s and the massive anti-war demonstrations at the beginning of this century.
One student activist spoke of the current difficulties of using public space on the Columbia campus for unionizing, where the rules of institutional decorum did not permit such activity, deeming it “confrontational.” Breaking the rules, however, is indeed what gets social movements noticed.
The group agreed that holding a public space indefinitely was not necessary to make a protest effective, so long as the innovative ideas being discussed continued to circulate after the physical protest ends. A street protest might ultimately be ephemeral, but as the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement demonstrated, one action could lead to a series of related actions. As with Occupy, the communication of a sustained message (“99%”) can spark social connections to recycle the message and use it for new forms of protest.
Istanbul’s Saturday Mothers of Galatasaray Square are an example of sustained, networked protest with earlier roots. These activists have appeared since 1995 bearing photos of their children who were most likely murdered by government security forces. Their work was in turn inspired by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, women who since 1977 have mourned the disappearance of 30,000 individuals under Argentina’s dictatorship. Similar occurrences also take place in Mexico and Rwanda.
Similarly, many in the group claimed that the power of social media lies in the circulation of key phrases that act as an engine, generating an expanding desire for and a manifestation of change in the real world. Protesting the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York this past year, activists throughout the country made phrases like #Ferguson, #icantbreathe, and #BlackLivesMatter go viral, leading to clashes with the police, freeway shutdowns, and other interventions. Risking arrest or violence was key in getting these events noticed.
While one member said that activism seems to have flatlined since 2011, since it lacked uniform goals and organization, another claimed, that on the contrary, many more students are now interested in course work around social change. It is important to remember that only a few years have passed since the events of the Arab Spring and Occupy, and that systemic social change requires much more time.
Contributed by Terry Roethlein, Communications Manager, Center for the Study of Social Difference
Image: Brittany Ferrell, Ashley Yates, and Alexis Templeton, Co-Founders of Millennial Activists United, an organization focused on outreach, policy campaign, civic engagement and direct action, in Ferguson, Missouri.
CSSD Announces Two New Working Groups for Fall 2015
In fall 2015, CSSD will convene two new working groups: Pacific Climate Circuits, which will apply lenses of race, class, gender and sexuality to current analyses of climate change in the Pacific Region, and The Legacy of Bandung Humanisms, which will examine the post-colonial developing world’s espousal of a radical brand of humanism and self-determination.
Convening in 2015, Pacific Climate Circuits will apply 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, Adjunct Lecturer, Sociology, Barnard College, examines the specific political-economic systems culpable for climate change in the region, linking them to its histories of colonialism and neoliberalism. Researchers will seek 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 peoples.
The Legacy of Bandung Humanisms, also convening in the fall, is 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 uncovers 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.
A diverse group of scholars including Stathis Gourgouris, Director, Institute of Comparative Literature & Society and Professor, Classics, Columbia University; Aamir Mufti, Professor, Comparative Literature, UCLA; and Lydia Liu, Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities, Department of East Asian Languages, Columbia University, will trace the institutions, associations, writings, and artworks identified with the Bandung Humanisms movement, connecting them to current global struggles for social justice.
Banu Karaca in The New York Times
Banu Karaca, a member of CSSD working group Women Mobilizing Memory, was quoted in a recent New York Times article about creeping censorship amid the current flourishing of the arts in Turkey.
Karaca is a founder of Siyah Bant, an organization that monitors arts censorship in Turkey.
Read the New York Times article here.
CONFERENCE REPORT: 2014 Caribbean Digital Conference
The Digital Black Atlantic Project closed the fall of 2014 with an unprecedented event, its inaugural Caribbean Digital conference.
On December 4th and 5th, professors, artists, graduate students, activists and administrators explored the dimensions of digital expression and its implications on the Caribbean and its diaspora. Panelists from across the globe joined a conversation at Barnard College in person, on Skype, and via Livestream, sharing theories and cautionary tales about various approaches to building projects and creating community in an increasingly digital academic environment. With a focus on the Caribbean and its diaspora, the conference offered fertile ground for 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.
The conference showcased radical approaches to the archive throughout its seven panels. Researchers and educators of color were a strong presence at Caribbean Digital, contributing in important ways to the breadth of topics that inform the critical discipline that is the digital humanities. The panel discussions were preceded by the Kamau Brathwaite researchathon held on Thursday morning and afternoon. This singular event—kicking off the ongoing the collaborative constitution of an open-access, online bibliography of work by and on Caribbean intellectual Brathwaite—generated over 500 bibliographic contributions in just six hours.
With the help of Twitter hashtag #sxcd2014 and the conference website, extensive social media activity gave enormous reach to the two-day event. Questions fielded from Twitter kept the conversations fresh and helped to archive what is planned to be the first of many conferences concerning archipelagic formations of digital networks and/in the Caribbean. David Scott, anthropology professor at Columbia and founder of the Small Axe print journal, closed the conference with a provocative reflection on the futures of publishing.
The event's primary organizers were Kaiama L. Glover, associate professor of French and Africana studies at Barnard, Kelly Baker Josephs, associate professor of English at York College, CUNY, and Alex Gil, digital scholarship coordinator and affiliate faculty in English and comparative studies at Columbia. Generously supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia, along with the Barnard Africana Studies Department and Barnard's Committee for Online and On-Campus Learning (COOL), the conference drew a sizeable audience from within the campus community in addition to drawing participants from around the tri-state area and, of course, cyberspace.
PUBLICATION: Yarimar Bonilla on "#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States"
Yarimar Bonilla of the Digital Black Atlantic Working Group and Jonathan Rosa have published "#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States" in the January 2015 issue of the American Ethnologist.
As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, Bonilla and Rosa discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. The piece demonstrates how engaging in “hashtag activism” can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, examines how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Their analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in “hashtag ethnography.”
Read it here.
Lila Abu-Lughod's new book named "Best Book of 2014 on the Middle East"
Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press) was named a "Best Book of 2014 on the Middle East" by Foreign Affairs.
Abu-Lughod is Co-director of the CSSD project Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies.
Read John Waterbury's review here. Listen to Abu-Lughod discuss her work here.
Christian Lammert on "Welfare and Citizenship: The Pillars of Social Cohesion"
PUBLIC LECTURE:
Wednesday, November 5th, 5pm in 754 Schermerhorn Extension.
Christian Lammert, Professor for North American Politics at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin, will speak about the relationship between welfare and democracy—a question central to contemporary transatlantic debates surrounding capitalism, austerity, and inequality.
Over the course of the twentieth century in the United States and Europe, the social bargaining process we call welfare integrated capital and labor in ways that had a profound impact on political participation and legitimacy. Examining social policy and citizenship in a comparative framework, Christian Lammert, Professor for North American Politics at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin, will speak to the relationship between welfare and democracy—a question central to contemporary transatlantic debates surrounding capitalism, austerity, and inequality. Please join us in 754 Schermerhorn Extension on November 5th at 5PM for an enlightening lecture on this topic.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014 - 5:00pm
754 Schermerhorn Extension
CONFERENCE REPORT: Debating the “Woman Question” in the New Middle East: Women’s Rights, Citizenship, and Social Justice
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.
Debating the "Woman Question" in the New Middle East (Columbia Global Center, Amman) brought together scholars, academics, and practitioners to explore three broad themes: Political Economies and Women's Lives; Political and Legal Strategies for Citizenship and Social Justice; Islamic Feminism and Islamist Governance.
Read the full Conference Report here.
WOMEN MOBILIZING MEMORY: Patricia Ariza on Culture as a "form of resistance"
TRANSFORMING TRAUMA WITH THEATRE
“Culture is a form of resistance,” asserted Colombian playwright, director, producer, and actor Patricia Ariza as she met with twelve members of the Center for the Study of Social Difference's Women Mobilizing Memory working group at the Hemispheric Institute in New York City.
Ariza was recently in town to accept the 2014 Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women but she took time to discuss with the group her near fifty years of work employing theatre to promote social justice, particularly as it applies to Colombian politics, political violence, and women. Ariza is co-founder of the highly influential Teatro La Candelaria, Colombia’s first independent, experimental theater, and for the past 25 years has focused primarily on women and social justice, empowering traumatized citizens to express through public performance their experiences during the massive violent conflicts that have rocked Colombia for decades. These performances help transform pain into something socially constructive, she said.
Ariza showed a video of an encuentro, or action, she orchestrated in 2009 at Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá where 300 women, mostly survivors of political violence and family members of deceased/disappeared victims, grieved and memorialized for a whole day the systematic assassinations of political leaders throughout the country. Civilian demonstrators joined by theatrical performers chanted “Dónde están?” (“Where are they?) as they carried photos of their missing and murdered relatives. Ritualistic choreography accompanied by fandango drummers and piano culminated in one dancer climbing atop the statue of patriarch Simon Bolívar. Participants stepped through life-sized silhouettes of the bodies of the victims as a song instructed the mourners, “If you want to sing, sing/If you want to cry, cry.” Many did just that.
A DIFFERENT WAY OF INHABITING PUBLIC SPACES
Speaking through a translator, Ariza said that originally she did not intend to devote the last quarter-century to doing memory work with victims groups. “At first, I thought it was an act of generosity,” she said, “but then little by little it came to me that they provide a special, deep knowledge—a different way of doing political actions…and inhabiting public spaces.”
Ariza told the group that only recently have women been permitted to politically inhabit public spaces like town squares, which have historically been reserved for male-oriented political and military purposes.
“Art can help a lot,” said Ariza, who said cultural actions and celebrations are important sites of resistance against political oppression and violence. “It can get people to stop thinking war is the solution. You can’t do that through laws—only through culture,” she said.
With a slightly bowed head and limited eye contact, Ariza discussed another action that memorialized the government-approved murders of approximately 4,000 members of the left-wing U.P. (Patriotic Union) party in the 1980’s. In the action, 1,050 U.P. survivors stood at 1,000 candlelit tables in Plaza de Bolívar wearing the clothes of the deceased and placing their possessions on the tables. She said people came from all over Bogotá to see the performance, which was repeated for three years.
A spirited discussion ensued after Melody Brooks, co-chair of the Gilder/Coigney Award, inquired about the U.S. “Plan Colombia” that funds military missions against drug cartels and left-wing insurgents. Ariza said that the Colombian military has provided ersatz results by perpetrating approximately 4,000 murders of “false positives”—innocent citizens falsely characterized as drug traffickers or insurgents.
Ariza said that in an effort to aid Colombia’s compromised peace process, she hoped to plan an international peace summit of women in theatre in New York in April 2015.
Contributed by Terry Roethlein, Communications Manager, Center for the Study of Social Difference
Image of Patricia Ariza, center, at the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro in Bogotá, Colombia, 2009, by Cristhian Ávila.
Women Leaders in Changing India
Anupama Rao, Women Creating Change project director for "Gender and the Global Slum" will participate in a discussion at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai, featuring: Anjali Bansal ’97SIPA, Managing Director, Spencer Stuart, Sheela Patel, Director, Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC), and Falguni Nayar P: ’12CC, Founder and CEO Nykaa.com. The panel will address the challenges and opportunities that face women in India's formal and informal economies.
The panel will be moderated by Vishakha Desai, Special Advisor for Global Affairs Columbia University, Professor of Professional Practice in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs.
Read more here.
CALL FOR PROJECTS: Women Creating Change
Women Creating Change (WCC) invites proposals for a new working group project that would begin in 2015. WCC will provide seed money of $45,000 over three years to working groups of scholars and practitioners whose projects are consistent with the mission of the Center (socialdifference.columbia.edu) and the specific goals of Women Creating Change (womencreatingchange.columbia.edu). Submission Deadline: Monday, March 2, 2015.
Call For Proposals
Women Creating Change (WCC) is a global research initiative of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, an advanced study center at Columbia University that supports scholarship on global issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. WCC invites proposals for a new project that would begin in 2015. WCC will provide seed money of $45,000 over three years to working groups of scholars and practitioners whose projects are consistent with the mission of the Center (socialdifference.columbia.edu) and the specific goals of Women Creating Change (womencreatingchange.columbia.edu).
Women Creating Change
WCC engages distinguished feminist scholars from across Columbia to focus on contemporary global problems affecting women and on women’s roles in addressing those problems. It also engages with broader networks committed to raising awareness of these issues, on campus and beyond. The innovative research program and working group model of WCC draws on the scholarly depth and global perspectives that animate the Center for the Study of Social Difference and the Columbia Global Centers. However varied in topic and regional location, all WCC projects involve multiple partners, at Columbia and beyond. They focus on changing the terms in which significant global problems affecting women are being addressed.
Of necessity, the work of WCC is interdisciplinary as well as comparative and transnational. It seeks to build on the rich resources and global perspective afforded both by Columbia’s faculty and its expanding network of Global Centers, insisting on deep knowledge of the history, the languages, and the cultures of the regions with which we engage.
WCC has developed a unique working group structure of close intellectual collaboration and exchange over multi-year periods. WCC seed grants are intended to support the development of such working groups. Under the broad umbrella of WCC, individual working groups led by Columbia and Barnard faculty work on a particular problem or issue in collaboration with scholars, artists, activists and policymakers in specific regions of the world where Columbia’s Global Centers are located (currently, Beijing, Mumbai, Amman, Paris, Nairobi, Istanbul, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro).
Project Proposals
Proposals may be submitted for consideration by any Columbia or Barnard faculty member(s) whose project aligns with the aims of CSSD and WCC, although preference will be given to faculty affiliated with one or more of CSSD’s five member centers and institutes. WCC seeks projects that are global and interdisciplinary in nature and favors proposals from an already-constituted core working group (typically 5-8 people) that closely links its work to one or more of Columbia’s Global Centers. (http://globalcenters.columbia.edu/). Each WCC working group should be composed of junior and senior scholars and practitioners from the U.S. and abroad, and should reach across multiple geographic regions, fields of study, specialization and expertise. For a list of current WCC projects, please see our website (womencreatingchange.columbia.edu).
WCC projects are expected to run for three years. Year 1 might concentrate on focused project development, including the constitution of an international working group that would convene exploratory seminars or workshops. Year 2 involves the most intensive intellectual work, featuring regular meetings of the working group and the active participation of international and regional fellows and affiliates, whether face-to-face or through videoconferencing using CSSD’s seminar room (752 Schermerhorn Extension). Fundraising efforts to develop and extend the project should begin early in Year 2. Year 3 is dedicated to post-project planning and dissemination of the project’s work through whatever means seem most appropriate to the working group. Examples might be conferences, the publication and/or translation of conference proceedings and/or edited collections of working group scholarship, or online publication of policy papers, curricular materials, or individual scholarship. Outside funding could support the continuation and development of the working group’s activities.
WCC project support budgets may be used by Project Directors at their discretion. However, budgets typically include the following: Course relief for a Project Director (one course per year for two years, alternating in the case of Project co-Directors); stipends for two graduate student participants and one graduate assistant responsible for program support; travel and accommodation for international workshops at Columbia’s Global Centers; support for visiting scholars or public conferences. Project Directors should be prepared to work with CSSD to seek additional funding sources.
We encourage prospective applicants to meet with WCC co-directors Jean Howard (jfh5@columbia.edu) and Marianne Hirsch (mh2349@columbia.edu) and/or WCC Associate Director Laura Ciolkowski (lec30@columbia.edu) early in the application process. Project proposals should not exceed five double-spaced pages and should include a project description, a provisional budget, a short CV for each tentative working group member, and a plan for group meetings, public events, and the dissemination of project research. Proposals should also describe a plan for soliciting and adjudicating applications for working group membership from the wider University community and beyond. Any anticipated curricular or pedagogical outcomes of the proposed project should be noted, although the absence of curricular components will not detract from the applications.
Proposals should be directed to Laura E. Ciolkowski, PhD, CSSD Associate Director (lec30@columbia.edu), by or before Monday, March 2, 2015.
Projects will be selected by the Executive Committee of the CSSD and applicants will be notified by March 30, 2015.
Nancy Kricorian Published in Guernica Magazine Daily
Nancy Kricorian's essay "Pilgrimage as/or Resistance," which was originally presented earlier this year at the Women Mobilizing Memory workshop at Depo in Istanbul, Turkey, has been published by Guernica.
Female Leadership, Labor, and Women's Lives in India
Anupama Rao, Project Director of the Women Creating Change working group "Gender & the Global Slum" reflects on female leadership, labor, and women's lives in India.
There are a number of contradictions that organize women’s lives in India today. The conditions and consequences of women’s work is a central one among them.
Female labor is not rare, neither is it new: women are overwhelmingly responsible for all manner of ‘care work’; they are employed in low-productivity agriculture and small-scale manufacturing; and they are present in large numbers in call centers. Women also occupy prominent decision-making roles in politics, and in the private sector. That is to say, neither women, nor the work that women do is invisible.
So far as education is concerned, new studies confirm that there exists no “gender gap” between the performance of boys and girls including in fields such as math and science until the onset of puberty. But it does not stop there. Studies also suggest that young women are significantly outperforming their male counterparts in high school and college, so much so that the underperformance of boys and young men—and its impact on gender relations more broadly—is now a topic of concern.
Yet a recent study found that female participation in the Indian economy, i.e., paid work outside the home, is among the lowest in the emerging markets and declining. Only about six percent of women are employed in the formal sector with access to social benefits, such as pensions or maternity. In the informal sector which employs the majority of Indians, whether men or women, women’s wages are half that of men’s. OECD calculations show that growth could be boosted up to 2.4% points with a package of pro-growth and pro-women policies.
Though enormous, the challenges women leaders face must be viewed against this backdrop of the under-valuing of female labor more generally, combined with the discrimination faced by women in all sectors of the economy with respect to equal pay and benefits.
Challenges to female leadership:
Below I outline a number of challenges specific to female leadership as a set of possible talking points for discussion. As will be obvious, they span the structural hurdles women face, as well as cultures of the workplace and workplace etiquette, issues which falls into the grey area of behavior, stereotype, and expectation:
a) Female leadership as a model of fire fighting, with women brought in to manage situations of crisis. For example: Lynn Laverty Elsenhans took the helm of Sunoco after shares had fallen by 52%; Marissa Mayer was hired to save a struggling Yahoo; and Mary Barra was appointed to the top seat at GM just weeks before its ignition-switch investigation
b) This is connected to this is the assumption that female leadership is “nurturing,” and helps to humanize companies and corporations. (Of course the other side of this logic is that women lack the competitive spirit to run companies with a firm hand, with an eye towards profits.)
c) Since women in positions of leadership are still rare, they often become tokens, isolated from other women due to the demands made on them for appropriate behavior.
d) Women find themselves excluded from spaces where networking occurs whether sports, late night dinners, or other kinds of “old boy networks” that are inimical to the presence of women. Juggling home and family, or the fact that women may not be interested in sports and other forms of socializing means that they may be missing from key social contexts that extend beyond the workplace, but function as an extension of the boardroom.
e) Women leaders are often subject to gender stereotyping. They are viewed (by both men and women) as aggressive, or they are subject to extra scrutiny because they are seen to be emotional, irrational, or less competent than men.
f) Women often lack strong role models and lack mentors who can illuminate work culture and expectations that are usually implicit, rather than explicit
g) Company culture does not support work/life flexibility that can be essential to women, and rarely are women provided the social benefits they require to balance expectations at home and at work. If women do make the decision to take a break in their career, or to consider flexible work options, their loyalty and commitment is questioned.
What do we need?
1) A model of nurturing female leadership from within, with gender-positive models that encourage women to support each other’s careers, and to challenge the tokenism that pervades the rhetoric of gender inclusion.
2) Developing women’s sense of worth and confidence in their judgment is a necessary corollary to their ability to model positive behavior for younger women.
3) Stronger workplace regulation, prevention from harassment, and the institution of structures of accountability and transparency would go a long way in enabling a level playing field in the workplace for women and minorities.
4) Women in the public, formal sector should recognize the unequal labor conditions, and the situations of risk and precarity under which most women (and many men) work. The recognition of connections between broad inequities, on the one hand, and gender discrimination within the workplace on the other, is essential for creating a strong sense of corporate responsibility on the part of women leaders who are in a position to draw on their own experience to push for social benefits for others.
Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College; a member of the Executive Committee for Women Creating Change and Senior Editor for the journal Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
VIDEO: "Gender, Memory, Activism"
Women Mobilizing Memory workshop: "'Coming to Terms' with Gendered Memories of Genocide, War, and Political Repression," featuring Marita Sturken, Marianne Hirsch, Nükhet Sirman, Meltem Ahıska, and Nancy Kricorian. Istanbul, Turkey, September 2014.
VIDEO: "Art, Performance, and Memory"
Women Mobilizing Memory workshop: “‘Coming to Terms’ with Gendered Memories of Genocide, War, and Political Repression,” featuring Andreas Huyssen, Alissa Solomon, Carol Becker, Diana Taylor, and Maria José Contreras. Istanbul, Turkey, September 2014.
VIDEO: "Creating Alternative Archives"
Women Mobilizing Memory workshop: “‘Coming to Terms’ with Gendered Memories of Genocide, War, and Political Repression,” featuring Leyla Neyzi, Susan Meiselas, and Silvina der Meguerditchian. Istanbul, Turkey, September 2014.
Columbia Global Centers Showcases Women Mobilizing Memory
"Led by Professors Marianne Hirsh, Jean Howard, Diana Taylor and Ayşe Gül Altınay, the Mobilizing Memory for Action workshop engaged scholars, artists and activists from Chile, the United States and Turkey in public events, an art exhibition, a gender-memory walking tour and theater performances. "
Read more about the September 2014 Women Mobilizing Memory Istanbul workshop in this month's Columbia Global Centers E-Newsletter.
PUBLIC ROUNDTABLE: Women and Politics: A Turning Point?
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Roone Arledge Cinema, Columbia
In 2012, women comprised an impressive majority of the electorate. Currently, women hold a majority of twenty seats in the Senate. More women than ever before are raising young children while serving at the Capitol. Moreover, it is likely not only that the U.S. will see a woman presidential candidate in 2016, but also that Republicans will again nominate a woman for their vice presidential seat. “Women and Politics: A Turning Point?,” the 2014 public program co-hosted by Women Creating Change, a global initiative of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, and the Columbia Alumni Association (CAA), explored these and other issues in a roundtable discussion, featuring: Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer ‘97GS, NPR reporter Mara Liasson, and poet and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt ‘75SOA. Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies and Dean of Social Sciences Alondra Nelson moderated.
The speakers were in agreement that the 2012 election cycle could augur an exciting turning point for women in politics. According to Liasson, “This year, Republicans realized that they are behind the curve.” She noted the marked increase in Republicans who have been “coming out for over-the-counter birth control,” even though no drug company has ever appealed to the FDA for it. But, for Liasson the point is not whether Republicans’ current stance on birth control is realistic. Rather, in her view, “It is progress when Republicans are for over-the-counter birth control, because it means they’re moving farther to the center,” regardless of what their political motives may be.
Pollitt preferred to view Republicans’ new stance on birth control as part of a broader, less optimistic historical shift. She pointed out that making birth control available over-the-counter would actually delimit women’s access to reproductive rights—cutting benefits through Obamacare, such as free copays, and discouraging women from seeking a physician’s advice about the best medication.
Nelson broadened the conversation by noting that 2014 was a watershed year for women holding presidential seats in countries such as Chile and Liberia. She asked, what sort of promise do these leaders hold out for women’s political progress all over the world?
Both Brewer and Pollitt echoed the sentiment that simply having women leaders in positions of power is not enough. Brewer addressed the problem of the political pipeline and women’s access to power. On a pragmatic level, entering the pipeline—whether via work on a community board, a municipal district, holding office in a PTA or participating in other ways in the women’s movement—is the surest way for a woman to enter politics.
Pollitt interjected with a question that helped to focus the conversation: “Are we talking about women, or are we talking about feminists?” According to Pollitt, a neoconservative politician like Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is a prime example of a woman leader who is not always working on behalf of women’s rights. Although Pollitt recognized the practical advantage of the pipeline that Brewer described, she pointed out that a lot of women leaders—such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., or perhaps even Hillary Clinton here in the U.S.— emerge from pipelines built on political dynasties rather than civic engagement.
As the conversation turned towards the possibility of Clinton running for the Democratic presidential seat in 2016, Pollitt remarked that Clinton might “dis-identify herself from women as a ‘special category,’ instead trying to position herself as ‘the President of everyone.’” Liasson suggested that the white, married women who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012—and whose vote Romney won against Obama by seven points—could very likely vote for Hillary. “I think that a lot of married women who voted for Mitt Romney will look in the mirror and see her looking back,” said Liasson. “I believe that the first woman President of the United States has to be old,” Liasson added. “There can’t be any question amongst voters about whether she’s qualified or has the necessary experience.”
Brewer agreed, adding that Clinton is also “unique.” According to Brewer, Clinton represents a woman leader who, even in her position as Secretary of State, tried to find nonviolent ways to “promote peace through art” around the world, using our own city’s collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A very passionate audience brought a number of new issues to the table during a rousing Q&A. Perhaps the most provocative questions concerned the particular obstacles facing women of color with political aspirations and the problems that partisanship raises, which one audience member implied could be seen in the all-Democratic composition of the panel itself. To the women-of-color question, Brewer ardently advocated for campaign finance reform at all levels, pointing out how hobbling socioeconomic disadvantage is for women of color in electoral politics.
“The good news is that the rising American electorate are young and minority,” Liasson. If we are indeed on the brink of a turning point in electoral politics, as these speakers’ hopeful words predict, then it seems we can count on witnessing more diversity and younger voices in the near future—even if an end to fractious partisanship is not yet in view.
Nicole Gervasio is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.