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.

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.

Refugee Cities Member Organized Nov. Conference Aimed at Reframing Migrant "Crisis" in NYC

Refugee Cities working group member Hiba Bou Akar organized a conference, alongside Hugo Sarmiento, titled “The Migrant ‘Crisis’ in NYC: Immigration, Asylum, and The Right to the City.” Hosted by GSAPP, the conference was split into two panels: “Urban History of Immigrant ‘Crises’ in NYC,” “Formal and Informal Systems of Support and Care,” and “Housing Question and the Right to Shelter.”

For more on this conference, read the full Columbia Spectator story here.

Insurgent Domesticities Member Hollyamber Kennedy To Be Published in The Journal of Architecture

Insurgent Domesticities working group member Hollyamber Kennedy has a new article coming out in the Winter/Spring 2024 “Territories of Incarceration” special issue of The Journal of Architecture, titled “Wastelands of Empire and ‘Sites of Salvation’: Landscapes of ‘Reform’ in 19th Century Germany.”

More information will be shared when available.

Professor Jack Halberstam to Deliver Public Lectures in Sydney, Australia

Former co-director of the Queer Aquí working group and David Feinson Professor of the Humanities, Jack Halberstam, will be delivering a public lecture as part of the Queer PowerPoint series, held in Sydney, Australia, on December 15, 2023. In anticipation of the forthcoming work entitled The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy, this lecture will examine the particularities of what Professor Halberstam means by “wildness” as a space of possibility for breaking from binaries such as gender, sexuality and so on. Tickets are still on sale for this wonderful event here.

The event is hosted by the Power Institute at the University of Sydney.

Already sold out is Professor Halberstam’s talk on Thrusday, December 14, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia titled “All Fall Down: Post-Industrial Demolition Projects and the Aesthetic of Collapse.”

CSSD Members Participated in Faculty Roundtable "On Feminism and Palestine" on Dec. 4

CSSD Interim Director Lila Abu-Lughod, Transnational Black Feminisms co-director Premilla Nadasen, Insurgent Domesticities co-director Neferti X. M. Tadiar, and former Queer Aquí director Jack Halberstam — among others — participated in a faculty roundtable discussion titled “On Feminism and Palestine” this past Monday.

This event was co-sponsored and co-presented by Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Center for Palestine Studies, Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Iulia Stătică Publishes New Text in Routledge Architext Series: Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest (Routledge, 2023)

Iulia Stătică, member of the Insurgent Domesticities Working Group, has recently published Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest (Routledge, 2023), as a part of Routledge’s Architext series.

From Routledge: “Urban Phantasmagorias examines the legacies of socialist housing in the city of Bucharest during the period of communist rule in Romania. The book explores the manner in which the socialist state reconfigured the city through concrete acts of demolition and construction, as well as indirectly through legal frameworks aimed at the regulation of women’s reproductive agency, in an attempt to materialize its idea of modernity. It follows the effects of this state agenda with a focus on the period between 1965 and 1989 through an investigation of the transformations, representations, meanings, and uses of domestic spaces.”

Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Members to be in Conversation at UC Berkeley's Nordic Center

On December 6, two members of the Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group, Elizabeth Löwe Hunter and Jasmine Kelekay, will be in conversation at the Nordic Center at UC Berkeley. Part of the Nordic Talks podcast, the conversation will be available after the event: The Myth of the Nordic Utopia - Social Democracy Through Afro-Nordic Perspectives.

CSSD Interim Director Lila Abu-Lughod receives the 2023 Career Award from the Association for Feminist Anthropology

CSSD Interim Director Lila Abu-Lughod received the 2023 Career Award from the Association for Feminist Anthropology on November 18, 2023, at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association held in Toronto, Canada.

Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Member Temi Odumuso Participated in Weekend of Archival Happenings at SouthNord Artfest

In late November, Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group member Temi Odumuso participated in a weekend of archival happenings at the SouthNord Artfest at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Sweden.  She was part of a mini-seminar in collaboration with the Ethnographic Museum on the history of black people in the Nordics.