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