What is a feminist jail and why shouldn’t we fall for it?
Think piece on CSSD event How to Abolish Prisons: Gender an Analytic.
Think piece on CSSD event How to Abolish Prisons: Gender an Analytic.
By Nia Paz-Diaz
On November 13th, the Center for the Study of Social Difference hosted abolitionists, activists, and academics to dismantle the concept of "feminist" jails, scrutinize their deceptive framing, and critique the use of feminist rhetoric to build new jails. The event, How to Abolish Prisons: Gender as Analytic, featured three speakers with varied expertise in abolitionist work: Dr. Sarah Haley, a historian at Columbia University who specializes in carceral history; Rachel Herzing, the executive director of the Center for Political Education; and Romarilyn Ralston, the executive director of Project Rebound, which supports formerly incarcerated students across the Cal State system.
The scholars began with an in-depth discussion on the opening question: what is a “feminist” jail? Per definition, a feminist jail uses gender-responsive approaches to address the imprisoned realities of women and non-binary people, their unique pathways into the system, and their differences from cis-gender men (The Women’s Center for Justice, 2022). The mission of the mythical gender-responsive jail is to provide programming that increases employability, healing on trauma, family community, and independence. In its ideal form, a gender-responsive jail functions independently from men's prisons, features operational equipment suited to women and non-binary people, prioritizes mental health care, and includes family visitation centers. Additionally, the facility would employ predominantly women guards and cultivate a calming, safe physical environment for women and non-binary inmates (p. 5).
Students listening in to the discussion in Mary’s Episcopal Church.
Some institutions have begun using aspects of this approach: for instance, Los Angeles's largest women's jail recently initiated a gender-responsive staff training, implemented a pregnancy liaison program, and modified the physical environment to improve safety (Olson, 2019). However, no jail has successfully initiated a complete, comprehensive gender-responsive approach; instead, they beguilingly adopt a select few, simple elements to provide a picture of progress and a dedication to the supposed renewal of the women inmates to continue their management. As shown in the evaluation of the Los Angeles jails – one of the leading jails in approaching the gender-responsive measures – ample weaknesses existed such as lack of permanent funding, lack of private spaces for women, and lack of information on women’s individual needs (p. 440). In addition, the jail was required to provide access to these programs under Title 15 of the California Code of Regulations (p. 441).
The origin of this gender-responsive approach emerges from the critical, harsh reality that plagues our carceral system: although a violent environment for every inmate, prisons further punish women inmates through negligence and a profound failure of responding to women's needs. Thus, prison campaigners have utilized gender-responsive campaigns to build jails rooted in feminism with a commitment to uplifting incarcerated women through renewal, job training, and the like. However, this begs the questions which arose during the discussion: How has feminism been weaponized inadvertently (or, intentionally) to expand the carceral state? How is this feminist rhetoric expanding jail construction campaigns in New York City?
Although a theoretically feminist prison might appear progressive on the surface, this approach is inevitably intertwined with a reformist framework that upholds and accelerates the carceral system and its profit. As Dr. Haley remarked during the discussion, “the history of prison is entangled with the history of reform; the history of penitentiary as one of ‘betterment’ and ‘enlightenment’. However, we have seen the proof that prisons are violent – and no amount of mauve paint changes that.” Once incarcerated, women’s lives are fundamentally disrupted. They lose their jobs, are unable to take care of their children and family members, and suffer mental health crises due to the conditions of prisons. Incarceration itself is the root issue for unemployability and lack of parental care – rendering any prison job training and/or family care program ironic and wildly futile. By stripping women from their employment and families, prisons are diminishing any chance of economic growth and family care for renewal. This is coupled with the fact that a majority of incarcerated women have exceptionally short stays: the average stay in jail for women is around a month, as elaborated on below.
Inarguably, prisons are not designed with women in mind and neglect women’s basic needs as a form of punishment, as exemplified by the lack free menstrual hygiene products, close proximity to male prisons, invasive bodily searches, plenitude of male guards, solitary confinement for women with a sexual abuse history, inadequate infrastructure for expecting or current mothers, sexual abuse by guards, etc. Ironically, these violent issues are forced upon non-violent women: the majority of incarcerated women have extremely short stays for non-violent crimes. In 2022, there were about 93,000 women in jail on a given day and the average stay for women was 19 days, compared to 36 days for men (Kenney, 2022). The average jail stay for women within L.A. county jails is just under 2 months (Hare, 2016). In New York City, the mean stay was 26 days in 2019, while the median length of stay is 4 days (Tomasack, 2021). Thus, women endure profoundly traumatic conditions for remarkably brief periods. As one can imagine, the damage of being incarcerated for less than a month is harmful regardless of the renewal programs offered, as the women who are incarcerated cannot care for their families or attend to their jobs. Additionally, according to the latest available national data, 32% of women in jail are there for property offenses, 29% for drug offenses, and nearly 21% for public order offenses (Swavola, 2016, p. 9). Most incarcerated women are on low-level, nonviolent charges. With these facts in mind, the construction of new gender-responsive jails serves to facilitate the existence and promise of jails more than the renewal of incarcerated women. If uplifting women and maintaining their employability was the goal, the city would implement proactive strategies that prevent large numbers of women from entering the carceral system in the first place.
In the 1980s, New York City officials utilized this “feminist” jail approach to campaign for the Rose M. Singer Center at Riker’s Island. Campaigners touted a ‘pleasant jail’ where women could renew themselves through economic training and live in comfort (NYC Department of Correction). The approach advertised superficial modifications, without including critical gender-responsive measures such as pregnancy liaison programs or hiring women guards. During the discussion, Dr. Haley detailed how the Rose M. Singer Center campaign in 1988 was posed as a state-of-the-art facility with 800 beds, featuring a 25-bed ‘nursery’ and job training programs in horticulture, sewing and culinary arts, touting yellow, blue, mauve and rose colored walls (NYC Department of Correction). The plan proclaimed the Center to be a place of hope and renewal for the female inmates. However, these shallow modifications did not address the critical issues women face in jails. The plan, in Dr. Haley’s words, is a “radical shrinking of imagination and possibility.” “Feminist” jails severely limit the opportunity to improve women's lives; instead, their existence relaxes the minds of the public, granting them the illusion that incarcerated women are comfortable and changing their lives within their pink cells.
News about the Rose M. Singer Center Opening on Rikers (NYC Department of Correction.)
As time has passed, this “feminist” campaign for the Singer Center has confirmed its brutal inadequacy: multiple women at the Center were sexually and physically assaulted over the years by correctional officers (Hamilton, 2015), have reported unsanitary and unsafe conditions during a global pandemic (Singer, 2020), and hosts no betterment programming or drug abuse rehabilitation (White, 2020). Even Rose Singer’s family has stated that they wish for the removal of her name from the abusive center (Singer, 2020). Prisons are not environments where women can be uplifted and supported into betterment – even if they are built on the premise of that mission. Meanwhile, the building cost of the Singer Center was over $100 million tax dollars in 1988 (NYC Department of Correction) – money that should have been utilized towards community resources, low-income housing, accessible mental health services, and other preventive measures to help young women. As Rikers closes and plans for new facilities move forward, the replacement for the Singer Center will be located in Kew Gardens—attached to a men's prison—at an estimated cost of $261 million (The Women's Center for Justice).
The cycle of prison reform and its inevitable failure runs throughout New York City's carceral history: Rikers Island itself was built as a reform to replace the infamous Welfare Island. Over a century ago, prison reformers criticized and brought to light the violent, unsanitary facilities of Welfare Island which housed the city jail, mental health facilities, and what officials deemed “the city’s destitute” (Shanahan, 2017). In 1927, the State Commission of Correction released a report denouncing the penitentiary for its ‘deplorable’ conditions. The report stated “the cells are small, poorly ventilated, and without modern sanitary conveniences,” (Shanahan, 2017). The same issues persisted, millions of dollars later, after relocating to a new island. Rikers Island was plagued by the same conditions, critiques, and is now set to be replaced.
Prison reform, by definition, can never be feminist. Feminist ideology is centered on the principle of self-determination: the fundamental right of individuals – especially women and gender minorities – to control their own bodies, identities, lives, and resources free from patriarchal control. This concept encompasses bodily autonomy, economic independence, and the freedom to make choices about their own existence; thus, the use of feminism to campaign for prisons fundamentally contradicts one of the core principles of feminist ideology. Prisons strip women of their right to control their own bodies and make choices about their lives. Upon incarceration, women become subject – in most cases, violently – to decisions made by men.
Conversely, abolition is fundamentally aligned with self-determination. As Herzing articulated in our discussion, “you can’t be a feminist without believing in self determination and if you believe in self-determination you believe in the self-determination of all people.” There is no such thing as a ‘pleasant’ jail, and regardless of the opportunities for women inside. Ralston remarked, “A prison is a space of punishment, not care or rehabilitation.”
Abolitionists have shown us that radical imagination and action for the future is possible. Haley, Herzing, and Ralston exemplify the myriad of creative pathways for an abolitionist future. Dr. Haley is currently fighting against a new proposed women's jail in Harlem, where community organizing has already shifted the terrain of what's possible. A coalition of Harlem residents, Barnard and Columbia students, and academics successfully campaigned to replace the jail with a plan for low-income housing. Their fight exists on the principles of building communities instead of cages. Yet, the fight continues. The city has shifted toward a cooperative housing model that would serve middle-income residents, not the low-income New Yorkers the community fought for. Organizations like Defend Harlem remain mobilized, pushing to ensure the city honors their commitment to affordable housing. This fight illustrates a crucial abolitionist lesson: dismantling the carceral state requires the fight of building prisons, and also vigilantly ensuring that what replaces prisons serves those most harmed by incarceration.
Herzing's work with her coalition, Building Community, Not Prisons, exemplifies this approach as she fights to stop two prisons from being built with imaginative strategies. They are challenging the proposed Letcher prison in Kentucky on environmental grounds. The coalition raised funds to partner with the Appalachian Rekindling Project, a women-led Indigenous organization, to purchase land on the proposed prison site with the goal of re-matriating it to Indigenous stewardship. This is self-determination in practice: marginalized communities reclaiming land and resources from the carceral state to build their futures. The work is ongoing, and the future remains contested—but these coalitions demonstrate that another world is imaginable and we can construct it.
Citations
Eagle, S. (2020, April 27). OPINION: No one belongs on Rikers Island. Ever. Queens Daily Eagle. https://queenseagle.com/all/opinion-no-one-belongs-on-rikers-island-ever
Hamilton, C. (2019). 2 women sue city over alleged sexual abuse at Rikers—POLITICO. https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2015/05/2-women-sue-city-over-alleged-sexual-abuse-at-rikers-022279
Kenney, J. L., & Dolliver, M. J. (2022). Time to Bail out: Examining Gender Differences in the Length of Pretrial Detention Using Survival Analysis. The Justice System Journal, 43(2), 203–217.
Law, V., & Nalebuff, R. (2023, March 29). Prisons Use Menstruation as a Form of Punishment. TIME. https://time.com/6265653/prison-menstruation-punishment/
Norton, J. S., Jack. (2017, December 6). A Jail to End All Jails. Urban Omnibus. http://urbanomnibus.net/2017/12/jail-end-jails/
NYC Department of Correction. (1988). 1988: Rose M. Singer & Her Rikers Jail. https://www.correctionhistory.org/html/searches/cnwsrosie.html
Rose, B. H., Lisa. (2016, September 22). Pop. 17,049: Welcome to America’s largest jail. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/22/us/lisa-ling-this-is-life-la-county-jail-by-the-numbers
Singer, S. (2020, May 12). Opinion | The Women’s Jail at Rikers Island Is Named for My Grandmother. She Would Not Be Proud. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/opinion/womens-jail-rikers-island-covid.html
Swavola, E., Riley, K., & Subramanian, R. (2016). Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform. Vera Institute of Justice. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://vera-institute.files.svdcdn.com/production/downloads/publications/overlooked-women-and-jails-report-updated.pdf?dm=1568746265
The Women’s Center for Justice. (2022). The Women’s Center for Justice: A Nation-Leading Approach on Women & Gender-Expansive People in Jail. Columbia Justice Lab. https://justicelab.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/Womens%20Center%20for%20Justice%20Report%205.18.2022.pdf
Tomasack, S., Scrivener, L., Bond, E., & Chauhan, P. (2021). Women in New York City Jails, 1995-2019. Data Collaborative for Justice. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021_07_09_DOC_Women_Analysis_FINAL.pdf
Valdovinos Olson, M., & Amendola, K. L. (2021). Promoting Health, Safety, and Wellness in Los Angeles County Jails: A Process Evaluation of Gender Responsive Programing for Incarcerated Women. Women & Criminal Justice, 31(6), 422–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/08974454.2019.1700874
Harlem: Stories of Repression and Resistance Walk led by Asad Dandia
Thursday, October 9th 5:00 - 7:00pm
Please join us for a guided walk through Harlem to learn about the neighborhood’s role in the movement against systemic injustice, specifically, police violence.
Harlem: Stories of Repression and Resistance considers the history of repressive policing in the neighborhood and organizing in response. The walk will cover historical events from the 1930s to the present, visiting the sites of flashpoints such as: the 1935, 1943, 1957, and 1964 uprisings against and challenges to police brutality; the civil rights movement and the FBI’s Counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) aimed at its suppression; Black Power bookstores that doubled as Black activism hubs in the 1960s and 1970s; Mayor Rudi Giuliani-era aggressive enforcement policies like stop-and-frisk, which were guided by the conservative Manhattan Institute’s ’broken windows theory’; and the surveillance of Muslims especially post- 9/11. As such, the walk will give a deeper appreciation of not just oppressive structures but also the role of this urban village in advancing a people’s self-determination and social solidarity. Afterwards, there will be an opportunity for attendees to speak informally with the guide and each other over Somali chai. Register here.
Harlem: Stories of Repression and Resistance is part of CSSD's yearlong program Countering the Carceral State, which explores interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad. The walk is co-sponsored by the Columbia Oral History MA Program and co-presented as part of their Thursday Evening Event Series, which in 2025-2026 explores the relationships between place, memory, and oral history through a series of site-specific oral history events.
Asad Dandia is a Brooklyn-born public historian, lecturer, and tour guide. As an undergraduate, he founded a mutual aid organization to feed his community, which was infiltrated by an NYPD informant, pushing him to join an ACLU-led lawsuit challenging police surveillance of NYC's Muslim communities. The lawsuit resulted in successful policy change that brought civil rights protections for all New Yorkers. Currently, he operates New York Narratives, a walking tour project that advances new perspectives on the city by highlighting erased, underrepresented, and forgotten community stories. He also lectures at CUNY and is a tour guide at the Museum of the City of New York. He holds a master's degree in Islamic Studies from Columbia University.
Location Details:
We will meet at the mural “From Harlem with Love: a Mural for Yuri and Malcolm” on West 125th Street & Old Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Directions: The 1 train to 125th street and walk over to the mural
Location Link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/otubSsMLaUnuamiC6?g_st=ipc.
In Defiance: Launch Party
An arts and culture celebration, inspired by the legacy of Malcolm X, was hosted by the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University at The Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center to kick off the 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 explored interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad. Program events probed 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.
Event Overview
The event began at 5:30 PM on Friday, September 12th with some pre-event tour and opening drinks. The drinks reception was accompanied by a guided tour of the historic Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center.
The tour was then followed by with framing remarks and a screening of a video essay, From the Ruins: A Prelude, by renowned scholar and curator Sohail Daulatzai (UC Irvine). From the Ruins: A Prelude is a reckoning with the histories of radical internationalism that Malcolm X demands and a portal into the tensions between the catastrophic and the quotidian, here and there, then and now.
The evening was capped off with an live concert featuring the acclaimed duo of Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith performing their album Defiant Life.
This event was co-sponsored by the Department of Music, and was in collaboration with the Institute for Research in African American Studies and the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University.
Two New Working Groups at CSSD Launching Fall 2025
Two new working groups, coming from a highly competitive selection process, will be launching at the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) in the 2025-2026 academic year. CSSD projects address gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of inequality to foster ethical and progressive social change.
Black Archipelago
Black Archipelago considers critically and recasts responsibly narratives about how the production of Black space is foundational to imaginative Black placemaking, self-actualization, and ways to catalogue future and existing spaces. The Black Archipelago also describes both Black people’s shared encounters with white supremacy as well as, more crucially, how Black people stay connected to each other, to place and to notions of blackness. Black Archipelago seeks to advance collaborations and, hopefully, methodologies grappling with the many threads of domination and insurgent innovation constituting historical patterns of the Black experience.
A Black archipelago is an answer to the question of how to think about enduring crises and enduring people in the Black World. This framework allows us to pay closer attention to how scholars, activists, and artists engage the poetics and materiality of Black life to explore ideas about repair, inequality, resistance, and liberation.
Project Directors:
Brandi T. Summers, Associate professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University
N. D. B. Connolly, Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
University and Crisis
Conceived in response to recent developments at Columbia University and Barnard College and in line with CSSD’s new thematic focus on crisis, the working group is engaged in a year-long series of reading meetings and public programs to explore the state of the university today and how we got here.
Rather than approaching the current crisis moment as an aberration, the group aims to contextualize it within longer histories of the university and its entanglement with wider socioeconomic and political structures. Focused on four conceptual figures and sites, “the archive,” “the experiment,” “the student,” and “the lexicon,” the group engages with critical university studies scholarship to think through universities’ entanglements with colonialism, slavery, and their afterlives; the role of the university in reproducing socio-economic inequalities; the precaritization of academic labor and its impact on academic freedom; the securitization of campuses; financialization, performance metrics, and branding for the neoliberal university; affirmative action, diversity, and the tokenization of difference/administrative co-opting of ethnic and gender studies; and universities as real estate developers with massive displacement effects.
This group is supported via CSSD’s partnership with the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study (Gordon Institute) at Teachers College.
Project Directors:
C. Riley Snorton, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and ISSG, Columbia University
Anupama Rao, Professor of History and MESAAS, Barnard College
This Enemy Institution: (Black) Study and the Insurrection Imperative
Thursday, September 18 · 5:30 - 7:30pm EDT
Please join us for a guided discussion with pre-circulated readings led by Dr. Dylan Rodriguez on counterinsurgency.
This Enemy Institution is a guided discussion that explores how deep intellectual study can initiate insurrection against counterinsurgency in the 21st century.
When the regimes of civil/human rights, liberal freedom, (social) justice, and “humanity” ostensibly “fail,” the archive of Civilizational warfare expands. This is happening in real-time: there is an acceleration of counterinsurgency projects, formed in a contentious scramble across state and extra-state venues, incorporating universities, humanitarian and philanthropic organizations, and capitalized social justice movements. The deadly inadequacies and alleged institutional betrayals of rights/freedom/justice/humanitarian (and related) regimes thus indicate neither political failure nor systemic dysfunction—appraisals that indicate a reformist imperative—but instead reveal the expansion of a 21st century Counterinsurgency Machine. Logics of neutralization, extermination, discipline, and empowerment shape this ensemble, which targets anti-Civilizational streams of liberationist activity and thriving. To analyze and confront this machine is to coordinate, study, and strategically theorize an insurrection imperative.
Register for the discussion here.
Readings for the guided discussion will be circulated by email to event registrants. Afterwards, please join us for cookies, snacks, and refreshments in the church garden.
This Enemy Institution is the first event in the Center for the Study of Social Difference’s yearlong program Countering the Carceral State, which explores interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad.
Dylan Rodríguez is a parent, teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator. He is employed as a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside where he has worked since 2001. Dylan was elected President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021 and in 2020 was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars. Since 2021, he has served as Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society, where he created the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream. Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UCR Department of Black Study, among others. His most recent book is White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Reading List (links will be provided via email):
Robert L. Allen, “Personal Reflections on the Road to Black Awakening in Capitalist America,” p. 118-122. (5 pages)
Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages, Chapter 1, “Domestic War Zones and the Extremities of Power: Conceptualizing the U.S. Prison Regime,” p. 39-74. (35 pages)
Dylan Rodríguez, “On University Abolition,” pp. 367-374. (8 pages)
United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 3-24: Counterinsurgency (2018), “Executive Summary,” p. Ix-xxi. (12 pages)
The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership, 2025: The Conservative Promise, (a.k.a. “Project 2025”), 2023:
Kevin D. Roberts, “Foreword: A Promise to America,” p. 29-46;
“Section One: Taking the Reins of Government,” introduction, p. 47-49;
Lindsey M. Burke, “Ch. 11, Department of Education,” “Mission” and “Overview,” (25 pages)
Freedom and Insurgence: Recalling Fanon
Dylan Rodríguez and Ezekiel Dixon-Román discuss insurgent educational and archival practices.
Organized on the occasion of the centennial of the decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon, Freedom and Insurgence brings together Dylan Rodríguez and Ezekiel Dixon-Román for a conversation about capacious and generative approaches to mass intellectuality. The speakers approach the global legacies of Fanon’s thought on ‘archives of the possible,’ which illuminate approaches to the problem of democratic education and the crisis of the university in our times.
Wednesday, September 17 · 5:30 - 7:30pm EDT
The event features:
A talk by Dylan Rodríguez (Distinguished Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies and the Department of Black Study at UC Riverside and winner of the 2022 Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought).
A response by Ezekiel Dixon-Román (Professor of Critical Race, Media, and Educational Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University).
A Q&A with the audience.
Freedom and Insurgence launches a new faculty working group on the university and/in crisis directed by C. Riley Snorton (Columbia) and Anupama Rao (Barnard), and spearheaded by the Center for the Study of Social Difference, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the Edmund Gordon Institute for Advanced Study. Focused on four conceptual figures and sites, “the archive,” “the experiment,” “the student,” and “the lexicon,” the group engages with critical university studies scholarship to think through education’s entanglements with wider inequitable structures and forces.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Center for Science and Society: Call for Applications: Co-Production of Knowledge Grants
Call for Applications: Co-Production of Knowledge Grants
Due October 27
How can the power and resources in research be redistributed from academia to local communities? Funds will support research projects led by community-based nonprofit organizations with support from a Columbia University student, faculty, or staff member. Awards of up to $10,000 are available.
An informational webinar will be held June 25 from 12-1pm et. Registration is required.
Upcoming Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) Event: You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take
You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take
May 22, 2025
6-7:30pm
Online
Event Description
As one of the nation’s leading anti-poverty organizers and moral voices, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis explores the largely untold history of poor people’s movements in the United States and traces her own journey through some of the most significant anti-poverty struggles of the past thirty years. In You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon Press, 2025), Theoharis and co-author Noam Sandweiss-Back give credit to the people leading the movement to end poverty, including multiracial groups of homeless people, mothers on welfare, farmworkers, coal miners, veterans, unemployed workers, students, and artists.
Drawing from personal experience, history, religion, political strategy, and more, Theoharis and Sandweiss-Back argue that American poverty will not end because of the goodwill of the powerful or through the charitable actions of well-meaning people alone. It will happen through a mass movement to end poverty, open to all, and led by the poor.
The book is a passionate reminder that poor people are not condemned to be subjects of history, but have always been agents of transformative change, and can be once again. Indeed, to reorient our society around the needs of everyone and reinvigorate the promise of democracy, the poor can and must become the architects of a new America.
Debashree Mukherjee Awarded 2025 ACLS Fellowship
Awards Recognize Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences Research
We are proud to announce that Debashree Mukherjee has been awarded a 2025 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The longest running program at the organization, ACLS Fellowships support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
After four years of restricting ACLS Fellowships to early-career scholars due to the impact of COVID-19, the 2024 competition was re-opened to scholars across all career stages. Professor Mukherjee has been recognized as one of 62 outstanding scholars from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process.
Mukherjee’s research project, Tropical Machines, explores nineteenth-century media experiments in penal colonies and sugar islands such as the Andamans, Mauritius, and Fiji, to argue that the machines that are considered emblematic of Western modernity were in fact forged in the “dark” tropics.
“ACLS is grateful that we are in a position to continue to fund this vital research that advances our understanding of human societies and cultures,” said ACLS Vice President James Shulman. “Representing many different fields of study—including African diaspora studies, art history, English, gender studies, musicology, philosophy, religious studies, and more—this year’s fellows demonstrate the importance of foundational humanistic inquiry in helping us to understand a wide range of questions concerning our collective and varied histories, narratives, creations, and beliefs.”
The ACLS Fellowship Program is funded primarily by the ACLS endowment, which has benefited from the generous support of esteemed funders, institutional members, and individual donors since our founding in 1919.
Upcoming Event with the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW): Missionary Women and the Imperial Roots of White Evangelical Feminism
Missionary Women and the Imperial Roots of White Evangelical Feminism
Gale Kenny, author of Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire
April 22, 2025
Lunchtime Lecture
12-1pm, BCRW Conference Room (Milstein 614)
Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism.
Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement to create a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant world view that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions among races were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritized issues like civil rights and racial integration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired to was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians. In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalism to focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire.
Bio: Gale Kenny is an associate professor in the Religion Department at Barnard College. Her research and teaching focuses on gender, race, and American religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of two books, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica (University of Georgia Press) and Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press). She is currently working on a new project about race and spirituality through a history of Theosophist Katherine Tingley and her early twentieth-century Southern California commune, Lomaland.
Open to BC/CU ID holders, BCRW’s lunchtime lecture series offers scholars and writers an intimate space to discuss new works and works in progress with colleagues and students. Lunch will be provided.
Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group goes to University of Iceland
Several members of the Afro-Nordic Feminisms working group presented their research at the "Pedagogies of Reckoning" seminar at the University of Iceland. Oda-Kange Diallo and Elizabeth Lowe Hunter discussed "Pedagogies of Togetherness: Black Study and Diasporic Consciousness in the Nordic Region." Benjamin Mier-Cruz presented "Diffracting the Colonial Lens: Teaching Nordic Cinema in the United States." Ellen Nyman shared her work on "Adopting Acting Techniques," and Faith Adiele spoke on "Arrival of the Afro-Vikings: The Challenge of Decolonizing Travel Writing." The three-day seminar focused on pedagogy and colonialism in the Nordic region.
Truelove Seeds Tour: Seeds of Diaspora
On October 18th, the Seeds of Diaspora working group visited Truelove seeds, a seed farm and consolidator of heirloom seeds in Glen Mills, PA. Owen Taylor, pictured at center, described their efforts to package and distribute diaspora seeds provided by culturally diverse community gardens across the US. Unlike other commercial seed catalogues, Truelove focuses on helping these groups to sustain the cultural practices and food traditions that exist in mutuality with the seeds they preserve. In gorgeous fall weather, we toured Truelove's heritage gardens of plants from Palestine, Mexico, and Southern Africa, amongst other places, which are being propagated and harvested in direct collaboration with the diasporic communities that maintain long standing relationships with them. While there, we also met seed farmers, seed-savers and permaculture practitioners visiting from New York and New Jersey, and were able to lend a hand with processing Mexican marigolds for Day of the Dead festivities (see picture below). We are planning collaborations with Truelove seeds into the future, including organizing a public symposium/workshop on seed-saving at Columbia in the spring.
Working group members at Truelove Seeds Farm, Glen Mills, PA.
Columbia Giving Day is Here on October 1,2024! Save The Date.
Columbia Giving Day x CSSD , October 1, 2024
The Center for the Study of Social Difference creates space for faculty to address emerging issues and cultivate partnerships across the Columbia University campus, within the United States, and overseas. Our faculty members are deeply committed to advancing the boundaries of knowledge and fostering creation in their respective fields.
We could not do this work without your help. Support CSSD this Columbia Giving Day on
October 1, 2024
Transnational Black Feminisms Working Group' 23-24.
The Recent Work of Dr. Nancy Reame from the Motherhood and Technology Working Group
* Upson K. Hall MS, Shearston J, Schilling K, Yan B, Reame N, Talge N, Schertzing C, Kioumourtzoglou MA. Tampon use as a source of toxic metal exposure: Results from NHANES 2001-2004. 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Pediatric and Perinatal Epidemiologic Research, Portland Ore, June 12-13, 2023.
* Gordián-Arroyo A, Reame N, Gutierrez J, Liu J, Ganzhorn S, Igwe KC, Laing K, Schnall R. Do correlates of white matter features differ between older men and women living with human immunodeficiency virus? Menopause. 2023 Feb 1;30(2):149-155.
CSSD Welcomes Professor Shana Redmond as our New Faculty Director
CSSD is thrilled to welcome Professor Shana L. Redmond as our new Faculty Director. Professor Redmond (she|her) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and holds a joint position at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race (CSER), one of CSSD’s five partners. A writer and interdisciplinary scholar of race, culture, and power, she is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, 2020), which received a 2021 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation with the special citation of the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Award for Criticism. Named a “Best Book of 2020” by National Public Radio (NPR), Everything Man received multiple awards including the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and the Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award from the American Musicological Society. In addition to being co-editor of and contributor to Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke UP, 2016), she is co-editor of the University of California Press series “Phono: Black Music and the Global Imagination.” She has published chapters, articles, and essays in outlets including The Futures of Black Radicalism, Current Musicology, Black Camera, Black Music Research Journal, Race & Class, Women & Music, and Brick: A Literary Journal as well as NPR, the BBC, Boston Review, and Mother Jones. Her work with artists and labels includes the critical liner essay to the soundtrack vinyl release for Jordan Peele’s film Us (Waxwork Records, 2019) as well as the notes for String Quartets, Nos. 1-12 by Wadada Leo Smith (TUM Records, 2022) and Nina Simone’s You’ve Got to Learn (Verve, 2023).
Professor Redmond’s current project is a forensic listening to Black life before mourning, a book she has been researching and writing this past year as a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. Shana Redmond brings not just her academic and artistic vision to CSSD but also extensive leadership experience, most notably in her three-year presidential term with the American Studies Association (2021-2024).
“I am deeply committed to collaborative study; I see its need and believe in its transformative potential. It is that focus on collaboration in thought within CSSD that drew me to this position and I look forward to the insights and knowledge that our working groups and programming will produce.”
- PROFESSOR SHANA L. REDMOND
Afro-Nordic Feminisms’ Successful Intervention at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies Annual Meeting in Seattle
Members of the Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working group participated in a panel at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS) Conference in Seattle, held this year May 9-12, 2024.
Seattle recently hosted the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS) annual meeting, where the Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group, with members from both the US and Scandinavia, gathered to engage in critical discussions on race, racialization, and Blackness in the Nordic countries. This meeting was notably supported by CSSD, for which Working Group members are deeply grateful.
The Working Group’s primary goal was to bring attention to issues often overlooked in these discursive spaces. This year's SASS coincided with the National Nordic Museum's exhibition "Nordic Utopia? African American Artists in the 20th Century." Our panel followed a discussion on the exhibition, sparking a meaningful conversation about the history and contemporary cultures of Blackness in the Nordics.
Additionally, the Afro-Nordic Feminisms had productive dialogues with indigenous scholars focusing on race and racialization in Greenland and Sápmi. These exchanges were invaluable in broadening the scope of the group’s discussions.
Looking ahead, a number of group members will attend a conference in Iceland in October, funded by the University of Iceland, to continue these very important conversations.
Overall, the meeting in Seattle was a significant success, advancing the collective understanding of members of the project and fostering deeper connections within the community.
Prepared by Monica Miller
Edited by Evan Berk
Members of the Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Participate in Panel at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies Conference in Seattle (May 9-12, 2024)
Members of the Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working group participated in a panel at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies Conference in Seattle, held this year May 9-12, 2024.
The Working Group’s primary goal was to bring attention to issues often overlooked in these spaces. This year's SASS coincided with the National Nordic Museum's exhibition "Nordic Utopia? African American Artists in the 20th Century." Our panel followed a discussion on the exhibition, sparking a meaningful conversation about the history and contemporary cultures of Blackness in the Nordics.
Additionally, we had productive dialogues with indigenous scholars focusing on race and racialization in Greenland and Sápmi. These exchanges were invaluable in broadening the scope of our discussions.
Click Here to read the full blog post!
Geographies of Injustice WG Organized and Participated in "Iberian Seascapes" Conference at the University of Lisbon: (May 23-4, 2024)
The Geographies of Injustice Working Group organized and participated in a two-day conference at the University of Lisbon (Portugal), titled “Iberian Seascapes: Culture, Performance, and Resistance in Asia, Africa, and the Americas” on May 23-4, 2024. This conference follows the tremendously successful “Iberian Soundscapes” Conference also organized by the working group in the fall of 2023.
Scholars from India, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States gathered for a two day conference to discuss themes of race, caste, law, sound, and cinema as it pertains to the "Luso-Hispanic Moment".
READ NOW! Ana Paulina Lee Interviewed for NYT Article on Music Exposing Religious Intolerance in Brazil
Brazil's Anitta faces backlash over her new music video, placing a spotlight on Brazil's religious intolerance and racism issues.
Geographies of Injustice Working Group co-director Ana Paulina Lee is interviewed by the New York Times on the situation in Brazil. Read the full article here.
Seeds of Diaspora Hosts Prof. Eric Verdeil for a Talk Titled "From Earth to Art: Seeing, Acquiescing, and Contesting the Anthropocene" on 4/24/24
On April 24, the Seeds of Diaspora Working Group co-sponsored a talk by Professor Eric Verdeil of Sciences Po, Paris. In his talk, entitled 'From Earth to Art: Seeing, Acquiescing and Contesting the Anthropocene' Verdeil presented his work-in-progress based in Paris and Lebanon, which deals with the metabolism and circulation of soils and excavation materials.
He began by discussing the soil depots that ring Paris, as documented by his PhD student Agnes Bastin who followed the flow of soil through the city. He then moved on to the sites and routes of hauling in Beirut, both for the excavation of sand and gravel for aggregate in concrete construction of new buildings and infrastructure; and for the removal of buildings and infrastructure destroyed in attacks. Verdeil's talk also covered the work of some land artists who've been commissioned by the city of Paris to deal with the soil depots outside the city, especially one near the Charles de Gaulle airport, and referenced the collaborative work of Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige , whose 'Unconformities' project was an installation of core sample-like elements that reveal the periodicity of violence and destruction in the city. The setting-in-motion of soils, plants and people was also the subject of work-in-progress talks by working group members Anelise Chen and Lynnette Widder earlier in 2024.