DAY ONE REPORT: "Women Mobilizing Memory" Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey
Jean Howard, Ayşe Gül Altınay, Milena Grass, and Andrea Crow participated in the opening panel of Women Mobilizing Memory, a working group that explores women's acts of witness and the gendered forms and consequences of political repression and persecution.
Women Mobilizing Memory is one of four working groups that, together, make up the "Women Creating Change" initiative of CSSD. The first-day conversation of the working group revolved around a range of themes, including: the academic/practitioner divide; the political efficacy of academic, artistic, and activist productions; the relationship between memory, history, and archives; the ethical repercussions of witnessing; as well as the intricate link between the personal and the political.
The working group visited the Depo Gallery to attend Ayşe Gül Altınay's and Işın Önol's “Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing” exhibit. After the curators were introduced, Banu Karaca discussed the politics of memory as reflected in Turkey's contemporary art and Işın Önol related the exhibit to the country's recent history. Artists who took part in the exhibit included: Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Susan Meiselas, Nar Photos (Serra Akcan, Fatma Çelik, Gülşin Ketenci, Aylin Kızıl, Serpil Polat), Truth Justice Memory Center (represented by Özlem Kaya), Aylin Tekiner, Emine Gözde Sevim, Lorie Novak, and Gülçin Aksoy.
Day 1 Report contributed by: Bürge Abiral and Dilara Çalışkan
Bürge Abiral is a Masters student in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University. Dilara Çalışkan received her M.A. in Cultural Studies at Sabanci University in 2014.
PUBLIC ROUNDTABLES: “Coming to Terms” with Gendered Memories of Genocide, War, and Political Repression," Istanbul, Turkey
Public Roundtables with Turkish simultaneous translations
September 17, 2014, 1:00-7:00pm
DEPO Gallery, ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Roundtable topics and speakers:
Creating Alternative Archives, with Leyla Neyzi, Özlem Kaya, Susan Meiselas, Silvina der Meguerditchian, and Şemsa Özar
Art, Performance and Memory, with Andreas Huyssen, Alisa Solomon, Carol Becker, Diana Taylor, Maria José Contreras, and Ayşe Öncü
Gender, Memory, Activism, with Marita Sturken, Marianne Hirsch, Nükhet Sirman, Meltem Ahıska, Nancy Kricorian, and Yeşim Arat
Schedule
1:00pm-2:30pm - Creating Alternative Archives
Moderator: Şemsa Özar (Boğaziçi University and Diyarbakır Institute for Social and Political Research)
Leyla Neyzi (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University) - “Young people Speak Out: The Contribution of Oral History to Facing the Past, Reconciliation and Democratization in Turkey” Project www.gencleranlatiyor.org
Özlem Kaya (Truth Justice Memory Center, Turkey) Creating an Alternative Archive through Video Testimonies
Susan Meiselas (Photographer, Magnum Photos, USA ) – Kurdistan
Silvina Der Meguerditchian (Artist, Argentina/Germany) – Nereye? / Where to?
3:00pm-4:30pm - Art, Performance and Memory
Moderator: Ayşe Öncü (Sociology, Sabancı University, Turkey)
Andreas Huyssen (German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA) - The Metamorphosis of the Museum: From Exhibitionary to Experiential Complex
Alisa Solomon (School of Journalism, Columbia University, USA) - Shoe Fetish
Carol Becker (School of the Arts, Columbia University, USA) - The Memory of Sugar
Diana Taylor (Performance Studies, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU, USA) - Is Performing Testimony, Testimony?
Maria José Contreras (School of Theatre, Catholic University, Chile) – The (Im)possible Performance of Forgetfulness
5:00pm-6:30pm - Gender, Memory, Activism
Moderator: Yeşim Arat (Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University, Turkey)
Marita Sturken (Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU, USA) - Architectures of Memory, Architectures of Torture, Architectures of Conflict
Marianne Hirsch (Gender Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA) – Mobile Memories
Nükhet Sirman (Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Turkey) – How to Gender Memories of Violence?
Meltem Ahıska (Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Turkey) - Counter-movement, space, and politics: How the Saturday Mothers of Turkey make the enforced disappearances visible
Nancy Kricorian (Author and Activist USA) - Place Names and Objects: Pilgrimage as/or Resistance
About
This series of roundtables occurs in the context of a five-day workshop on “Mobilizing Memory for Action” that brings together an international group of scholars, artists, and activists to analyze the activist work memory practices can enable. The workshop is part of Columbia University’s “Women Creating Change” initiative led by the Center for the Study of Social Difference and organized in collaboration with the Columbia Global Centers. “Mobilizing Memory for Action” began in December 2013 with a workshop at the Columbia Global Centers in Chile and continues in September 2014 with activities in Istanbul hosted by Columbia Global Centers | Turkey, Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Forum and DEPO Istanbul. Support has also been provided by the Blinken European Institute, Sabancı University, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Truth Justice Memory Center and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Turkey Office. The Istanbul program consists of a workshop with 35 leading scholars, artists and activists from Turkey, the United States, Chile and other contexts; an art exhibition and catalogue; documentary screenings; theater performances and post-performance discussions; and a series of public roundtables.
For more information about the exhibit, please click here.
WORKSHOP: Shifting Notions of Social Citizenship: The “Two Wests”
What is the welfare state? What happens when it disintegrates? What is the future of the family in light of its historical transformation?
Scholars and graduate students from research universities in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway convened to answer these questions during the Shifting Notions of Social Citizenship: The “Two Wests” workshop, held June 11-13, 2014 at the Columbia Global Center | Paris.
What constitutes a welfare state?
Maurizio Vaudagna chaired the opening session with welcoming addresses delivered by Brunhilde Biebuyck (Columbia Global Centers|Paris), Marc Lazar (Institut d’Études Politiques), and Raffaella Baritono (University of Bologna-CISPEA). Alice Kessler-Harris presented introductory remarks that asked participants to answer the elementary question, “What constitutes a welfare state?” Kessler-Harris showed how setting conceptual limits around the welfare state are made difficult by the variety of its present-day obligations.
Papers in the first session took up the definitional challenge by thinking about the concepts that undergird the intellectual production of the welfare state in the European Union and in comparative context between the United States and Sweden. Vincent Michelot (SciencesPo Lyon) chaired presentations by Maurizio Ferrera (University of Milan), Ann Shola Orloff (Northwestern University), and a research group that conducted a longue durée analysis of the welfare state in France and the United Kingdom, rooting the welfare state’s earliest beginnings in the 17th century and well before industrial capitalism supplanted mercantilism. Ferrera outlined the intellectual and political roots of the European Union idea, suggesting that a “neo-Weberian” typology offered solutions to the intractable differences between ideas about national sovereignty and the EU’s political and economic superstructure. Orloff examined “gendered policy formation” and rebutted arguments that the state simply reinforced paternalism as too simplistic. Orloff’s analysis challenged participants to think about how historically changing definitions of gender changed social policy and vice-versa.
What happens when safety nets go?
Day two opened with the question, “What happens when safety nets go?” Donna Kesselman (University Paris Est Créteil) chaired presentations by Christian Lammert (Free University of Berlin), Beatrix Hoffman (Northern Illinois University), and Sébastien Chauvin (University of Amsterdam). Lammert argued that in the process of re-commodification, the visibility of the welfare state’s provision in people’s lives diminishes, which undermines public support for these programs. The results are pernicious for democracy because as people are forced back into the labor market and forced to accept a shrinking safety net, their level of political participation also declines. Hoffman dug into the problem of healthcare in the welfare state by comparing citizen participation for health reform in Spain and the United States. Hoffman showed how Spain’s generous healthcare provision has failed to embrace the healthcare needs of a growing number of immigrations and how the United States has become increasingly less responsive to the demands of civil rights organizations, especially after hospital closures zipped through urban neighborhoods during the 1970s and 1980s. Chauvin answered the question from the perspective of precarious labor and the growing exploitation of contingent—not temporary—workers. Through participant-observation in two contingent work dispatch centers in Chicago, Chauvin asserted that the idea of “temp work” is a fiction because precarious workers often develop long-term relationships with a small number of employers.
The Future of the Family
The next session envisioned the future of the family. Mario Del Pero (Institut d’Études Politiques) chaired presentations by Chiara Saraceno (University of Turin), Robert O. Self (Brown University), and Laura Lee Downs (European University Institute, Florence). Saraceno argued that the EU forces a plural acknowledgement of different family forms and that family and family policy are not one and the same. Civil regulation regarding the family contains variety, but remain attuned to traditional conceptions of the family. Self argued that the push for the reconstruction of the welfare state after the 1960s came mostly from the center left, rather than reactionary forces. The extent of social solidarity from the New Deal had been exaggerated, while the myth of the breadwinner was a social idea before it ever became an economic reality. Downs pondered the future of social protection in France by looking at the history of its colonies de vacances, holiday camps that were established for working-class children throughout the country. The extent of centralization in France meant that the diversity of political and ideological groups that participated in the state was far-reaching. At the same time, Downs shows how fiscal pressures during the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrating just how reliant all groups were on a state committed to financing social activities and opportunities to build national solidarity and to develop equality among young adults.
Possibilities of Resistance and Solutions
The last session, held on the last day of the workshop, thought about possibilities of resistance and solutions to the present-day impasses and challenges to the welfare state. Olivier Giraud (CNAM) chaired presentations by Gro Hagerman (University of Oslo), Birte Siim (Aarlborg University), Marissa Chappell (Oregon State University), and Neil Gilbert (University of California-Berkeley). Hagerman questioned whether the Norwegian and Swedish welfare states could “have it all,” arguing that the fiscal basis of both welfare states is premised on their status as resource-rich states. Siim asserted that democracy and citizenship needed articulation outside of the nation-state framework and that the rise of right-wing populism was more than just racism and constituted a serious critique about the distributional objectives of the state. Chappell’s archival research found that the Civil Rights Movement galvanized movements for greater economic citizenship among poor people; however, gender bias and racism prevented the formation of alliances. Gilbert traced how the U.S. welfare state transformed from a system of entitlement to one increasingly checked by means testing and conditionality.
The workshop concluded with Vaudagna and Kessler-Harris synthesizing the wide-ranging contributions of the speakers and the dialogic exchange that occurred between sessions. All participants left with a greater sense of the enormity of the welfare state as an object of study and the importance of comparative analysis between countries and even supranational structures of governance. The work of thinking about the welfare state in historical, social and political perspective continues.
The Columbia University Blinken European Institute and the Interuniversity Center for European-American History and Politics convened the international workshop with the support of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University’s Department of History, and the University of Eastern Piedmont’s Department of Human Studies.
George Aumoithe
PhD student in History at Columbia University | Graduate Fellow, Social Justice After the Welfare State Project at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference
Rachel Adams, Director of the Future of Disability Studies Working Group, Won the 2014 Educators Award
The 2014 Educators Award committee from Delta Gamma Kappa, the society of women educators, selected Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability & Discovery by Rachel Adams, director of the Future of Disability Studies working group. Dr. Adams attended the international convention on Wednesday, July 30 and participated in a workshop with the committee.
CSSD Announces Two New Working Groups
CSSD has inaugurated two new working groups for fall 2013.
Social Justice After the Welfare State will be directed by Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History. The group will explore the implications of the declining welfare state for American politics, gender and race relations, and the future of American democracy.
The Digital Black Atlantic Project (DBAP) will also launch in fall 2013. Co-directed by Kaiama Glover, Associate Professor of French at Barnard College, and David Scott, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia, DBAP is a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary working group that has come together to invent a scholarly resource and digital platform for multimedia explorations and documentations of literary texts, visual documents, sites, moments, rituals and ceremonies, monuments and memorials, performances, and material objects emerging out of and concerning the Black Atlantic World.
PUBLIC LECTURE: Beyond Masculinity: Testosterone, Sexual Desire, and Gender/Sex
Everyone knows that sexual desire and testosterone are linked because men have higher testosterone, and testosterone is tightly linked to masculinity and sexual desire - right? But what do empirical data actually say? Professor van Anders discussed findings that support decoupling testosterone from masculinity and provide insights into the nuanced ways testosterone and sexual desire are - and are not - linked in humans.
From her multi-method research program that includes experiments, correlational studies, and qualitative focus groups, she argues that social neuroendocrinology, rooted in feminist science, provides a way to ask hormonal questions that have evolution and social construction in their answers, sidesteps nature-culture debates, and separates biology from biological determinism.
This event was presented by The Science and Social Difference Working group of the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference and co-sponsored by the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Psychology at Barnard College and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
KEYWORDS: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations
Colleagues from the Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Socio-medical Sciences discuss “Vulnerability” as a keyword in the study of social difference.
Featured participants were:
Walter Bockting
Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry and Nursing) and Co-Director, LGBT Health Initiative, Division of Gender, Sexuality, and Health, Department of Psychiatry
Columbia University
Katherine Ewing
Professor of Religion and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Sexuality
Columbia University
Marianne Hirsch
William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies and Director, Center for the Study of Social Difference
Columbia University
Richard Parker
Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Anthropology, and Director, Center for the Study of Culture, Politics, and Health
Columbia University
Moderator:
Alondra Nelson
Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies, Director, Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and Co-Chair, Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies Council
Columbia University
Keywords: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations is a series inspired by theinnovative interdisciplinary scholarship promoted by the Center for the Study of Social Difference. The series draws participants together from a wide range of disciplinary homes in order to explore the various ways we think about fundamental critical/theoretical ideas and to generate new vocabularies and new methodologies. The WGSS Council is a network of leaders from centers, institutes, and initiatives at Columbia University dedicated to women's, gender, and sexuality studies.