Judith Butler and Başak Ertür write for The Guardian about situation in Turkey

Judith Butler and and Başak Ertür, fellows in the CSSD project Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change, have written an opinion for The Guardian in support of those who signed the Academics for Peace position in Turkey in January 2016. Trials of these signatories began last week in Istanbul. Read the article here:

"In Turkey, academics asking for peace are accused of terrorism"

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Receives Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award from MLA

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has awarded Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and a founding member of CSSD affiliate the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the eighth MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. Professor Spivak is a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) and a co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Kenya and Ghana, Statistics and Stories.

The MLA Executive Council selected Spivak for the award on the recommendation of the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Review Committee and the Committee on Honors and Awards. Having first attracted acclaim for her translation of and magisterial preface to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) and her landmark article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1983), Spivak has influenced postcolonial studies, international feminism, postructuralist philosophies, critiques of globalization, as well as art and curatorial practices. She is also an activist in feminist and ecological social movements and rural education. In addition to receiving numerous honorary degrees, she has been awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy and the Padma Bhushan, given by the Indian government. The Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement will be presented to Spivak during the MLA Awards Ceremony at the January 2018 convention.

Read the award announcement on MLA Commons here.

Columbia University faculty sign a statement to the Turkish government to free Osman Kavala

Columbia University faculty, including CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch, urge the Turkish government to free Osman Kavala immediately and to drop all charges against him.

Read the full statement here, on osmankavala.org

Women Mobilizing Memory Fellow Alisa Solomon publishes "What Does It Mean to Remember AIDS?"

The day before World AIDS Day 2017, Women Mobilizing Memory Fellow Alisa Solomon published an article in The Nation reflecting on how we remember AIDS and its impact: "What Does It Mean to Remember AIDS?" Read the full article here:

"What Does It Mean to Remember AIDS?"

Alisa Solomon is co-editor of the forthcoming Women Mobilizing Memory book resulting from the research of this CSSD working group.

Video now available for "Gender and the Technologies of State Violence" panel

On November 16, 2017, as part of its Reframing Gendered Violence working group, the Center for the Study of Social Difference presented "Gender and the Technologies of State Violence" in Case Lounge at Columbia Law School, with support from the Dean of Humanities and the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia University.

You can now watch a video of this panel, featuring Sherene Razack (Department of Gender Studies, UCLA), Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (Law School, Hebrew University; International Visitor, Columbia Law School), and Miriam Ticktin (Department of Anthropology, New School University) and moderated by Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University) on the CSSD YouTube channel here.

CSSD Project on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence Convenes Workshop in Amman

A project of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence” (RGFGV), held a two-day workshop in September to explore and debate critical developments in the global framing of gender-based violence. The participants were a mix of anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, legal scholars, development professionals, and women’s rights advocates all working on violence, feminist advocacy, and representations of Muslims and Islam. They drew on their research to address the guiding question: What role does religion—and particularly Islam—play in naming, framing, and governing violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV)? Six themes structured the panels: Framing Islam, The Politics of Experience, Challenging Media Frames, Placing and Misplacing Blame, Pressures on Feminist Governance/ Strategies of Women’s Activism, and Reflections on Activism on the Ground.

Combating gender based violence (GBV) has emerged as a powerful agenda in international governance, national politics, and feminist and queer activism across many contexts. Dominant narratives about gender and GBV in certain regions assume that religion, often cloaked in the language of “culture” or “ethnic difference,” plays an important role. Continuing a tradition in projects at CSSD, RGFGV brought together critical thinkers and researchers working in the Middle East and South Asia, two regions where this narrative association is especially strong. They tackled issues as diverse as “child marriage” debates in Bangladesh (Siddiqi), controversies in India over women’s entry to shrines (Contractor), the politics of women’s activist organizations and influence of international agencies in now sectarian Iraq (Ali), Jordan (Ghosheh), and besieged Gaza (Hammami), reporting on gender violence in revolutionary Egypt (El-Rifae) and Occupied East Jerusalem (Shalhoub-Kevorkian), legal struggles over rape law in Jordan (Al-Khadra, Aziz), personal meanings of sexual violence for political prisoners in Iran (Talebi), the targeting of Muslim minorities in Europe (Shackle, Syeed), and even the role of GBV in U.S. Executive Orders and the counterterrorism industry (Volpp, Abu-Lughod).

Moving beyond the assumption that GBV is a universal phenomenon, the group historicized the production, applications, and implications of the term. When and how did GBV gain traction as the highly productive, powerful global concept it is today? In what ways does it bring into focus violence against certain bodies or by certain bodies while removing other violence and perpetrators from the scene? A central concern for the group was looking at what violence (and by whom) is not considered GBV. Many of the papers and discussions addressed these questions by carefully interrogating how the concept operates under specific formations of state violence that play out in the contemporary global political economy. Violence that occurs under settler colonialism or under regimes of state economic or military violence are rendered invisible by current definitions of GBV. How does blaming culture or religion for violence contribute to this invisibility?

Two of the presentations showed starkly how religion, and particularly Islam, has been implicated in staging a particular understanding of what constitutes GBV so that it can be deployed by wider geo-political projects. In January 2017, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” often referred to as “the Muslim ban.” Leti Volpp analyzed the implications of its identification of “honor killings” as a problematic practice by “foreign nationals” and the mandate to collect data on cases labeled as such. Concurrently, women are being called to engage in countering violent extremism (CVE) efforts. Lila Abu-Lughod explored the way the global counterterrorism industry paints (Muslim) women as both the victims of extremism and uniquely positioned to combat it within their own communities, giving rise to demands for gender mainstreaming and inclusion in a deeply problematic enterprise.

The disciplinary and professional diversity of the working group led to intense discussion of the narratives and framing of GBV and its relationship to Islam, revealing surprising commonalities across contexts and sparking intellectual synergies. Three Media Fellows had been selected from an international pool to join the RGFGV project. Before setting off on their individual reporting research in the region--in Egypt, Djibouti, and Erbil, the journalists participated in the workshop. Discussing problems of reporting on aspects of gender or Islam in the Middle East and Europe, they gave concrete examples they had faced in terms of “framing” the issues; a central theme that emerged in the workshop. Their professional experiences showed how American and European media standards constrain and drive the narratives that get media exposure, creating dilemmas especially when reporting on GBV. For example, covering a positive story on Muslim women can end up reproducing Orientalist assumptions in the realm of public opinion.

Rema Hammami, an anthropologist who faced similar problems representing domestic violence in the Middle East offered her own “how to report on GBV” list: individualize specific men as perpetrators; treat horror stories as unique; highlight women’s agency and homegrown solutions; show cases of modernity as the problem and tradition offering solutions. Others added: show how the category and many of the practices that fall under GBV are tied to contemporary state institutions, political economic conditions, and dynamics such as war-induced migration.

The varied backgrounds of the workshop participants also led to a consensus that exploring governance and resource distribution are key to understanding the global GBV agenda. Why do issues suddenly surface as resourced research questions? How are academic studies, activism, and governmental concern shaped by geopolitical developments? Who are the players and the experts? Who is not served by these agendas? Mapping the emergence of what Abu-Lughod called securofeminists in the counterterrorism industry or exposing the shadowy forces backing the U.S. Republican obsession with “honor killing” provides evidence of how feminists and politicians are profiting, politically and financially, from conjoining Islamophobia and GBV. In contexts of wars and occupation, resources assigned to “saving Muslim women” have often led to increased militarization with harmful consequences for women and others, including the suppression of dissent, the ahistoricization and de-contextualization of GBV and the undermining of local women activists. Hammami’s analysis focused on how international humanitarianism privileges resources for anti-GBV pedagogy amid the destruction and destitution of Gaza enabling it to colonize local activisms, misrepresenting activists’ calls to the world while undermining more relevant local projects. Her account provided sobering evidence of how the global GBV agenda can place “off-limits” urgent demands for political justice and transformation by populations subjected to acute forms of state violence.

A political economy of fear that dehumanizes certain populations according to their religious, racial, or cultural backgrounds shapes many of the contexts of violence in the regions the workshop discussed. This political economy of fear justifies material resources that fund the global GBV agenda, embedding racism, sectarianism, and imperial interests in too many of the programs meant to combat gender violence. Cross-regional discussion of humanitarian GBV, the NGO-ization of gender issues, and the politics of international aid revealed how political violence gets occluded by the human rights framework in which GBV and VAW are situated. Local development practitioners, legal advocates, and activists in the group (Aziz, Haram, Ghandour, Ghosheh) gave disturbing evidence of the influence of donor culture in the work they are attempting to do. They insisted on the agency of actors on the ground and detailed the complex, and often contradictory, political, theoretical, and structural issues they must negotiate.

Sara Ababneh drew attention to the ways feminist methodology, active listening, and attentiveness to experiences of women and girls could contribute to more robust definitions of GBV. The position of the girl child was given careful attention. How do historical and present contexts of colonization dictate legal and social policies to protect her or to oppress her? In Bangladesh, Dina Siddiqi described the way donors and local feminists may, in the name of protection or productivity, be undermining girls’ sexual agency. In Occupied East Jerusalem, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian demonstrated, the sacralized theology of the Israeli state frames girls as security threats in order to justify bodily harm and suppression of their rights. In Jordan, legal advocates have been debating the merits of laws about marrying one’s rapist, given the structure of current alternatives. To what extent should the voices of girls and women be used to define and redefine GBV?

Participants were exhilarated by the honest critical exchange of experiences, ideas, and knowledge during this workshop. They shared a commitment to advancing understanding of the challenges faced by those who feel the urgency of addressing gender violence. The workshop closed with two memorable activities: invitations to a private viewing of Widad Kawar’s collection of Palestinian and Jordanian women’s dress at Tiraz and a dinner hosted by Nissreen Haram to introduce the group to the wider dynamic scene in Amman of lawyers, artists, scholars, politicians, activists, social philanthropists, and entrepreneurs.

Supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, RGFGV partnered with the Columbia Global Center | Middle East, Amman for this workshop. CSSD projects on Women Creating Change are committed to internationalizing scholarship and knowledge. Previous projects such as Women Mobilizing Memory, Gender and the Global Slum, and Social Justice after the Welfare State have partnered with Columbia’s Global Centers in Istanbul, Mumbai, and Paris to further this goal. RGFGV is co-directed by Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, Janet Jakobsen, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. For the workshop program, click here.

Contributed by Joymala Hajra

CSSD Project on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence Convenes Workshop in Amman

CSSD Project on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence Convenes Workshop in Amman

Columbia Global Center | Middle East, Amman

A project of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence” (RGFGV), held a two-day workshop in September to explore and debate critical developments in the global framing of gender-based violence. The participants were a mix of anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, legal scholars, development professionals, and women’s rights advocates all working on violence, feminist advocacy, and representations of Muslims and Islam. They drew on their research to address the guiding question: What role does religion—and particularly Islam—play in naming, framing, and governing violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV)? Six themes structured the panels: Framing Islam, The Politics of Experience, Challenging Media Frames, Placing and Misplacing Blame, Pressures on Feminist Governance/ Strategies of Women’s Activism, and Reflections on Activism on the Ground.

Combating gender based violence (GBV) has emerged as a powerful agenda in international governance, national politics, and feminist and queer activism across many contexts. Dominant narratives about gender and GBV in certain regions assume that religion, often cloaked in the language of “culture” or “ethnic difference,” plays an important role. Continuing a tradition in projects at CSSD, RGFGV brought together critical thinkers and researchers working in the Middle East and South Asia, two regions where this narrative association is especially strong. They tackled issues as diverse as “child marriage” debates in Bangladesh (Siddiqi), controversies in India over women’s entry to shrines (Contractor), the politics of women’s activist organizations and influence of international agencies in now sectarian Iraq (Ali), Jordan (Ghosheh), and besieged Gaza (Hammami), reporting on gender violence in revolutionary Egypt (El-Rifae) and Occupied East Jerusalem (Shalhoub-Kevorkian), legal struggles over rape law in Jordan (Al-Khadra, Aziz), personal meanings of sexual violence for political prisoners in Iran (Talebi), the targeting of Muslim minorities in Europe (Shackle, Syeed), and even the role of GBV in U.S. Executive Orders and the counterterrorism industry (Volpp, Abu-Lughod).

Moving beyond the assumption that GBV is a universal phenomenon, the group historicized the production, applications, and implications of the term. When and how did GBV gain traction as the highly productive, powerful global concept it is today? In what ways does it bring into focus violence against certain bodies or by certain bodies while removing other violence and perpetrators from the scene? A central concern for the group was looking at what violence (and by whom) is not considered GBV. Many of the papers and discussions addressed these questions by carefully interrogating how the concept operates under specific formations of state violence that play out in the contemporary global political economy. Violence that occurs under settler colonialism or under regimes of state economic or military violence are rendered invisible by current definitions of GBV. How does blaming culture or religion for violence contribute to this invisibility?

Two of the presentations showed starkly how religion, and particularly Islam, has been implicated in staging a particular understanding of what constitutes GBV so that it can be deployed by wider geo-political projects. In January 2017, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” often referred to as “the Muslim ban.” Leti Volpp analyzed the implications of its identification of “honor killings” as a problematic practice by “foreign nationals” and the mandate to collect data on cases labeled as such. Concurrently, women are being called to engage in countering violent extremism (CVE) efforts. Lila Abu-Lughod explored the way the global counterterrorism industry paints (Muslim) women as both the victims of extremism and uniquely positioned to combat it within their own communities, giving rise to demands for gender mainstreaming and inclusion in a deeply problematic enterprise.

The disciplinary and professional diversity of the working group led to intense discussion of the narratives and framing of GBV and its relationship to Islam, revealing surprising commonalities across contexts and sparking intellectual synergies. Three Media Fellows had been selected from an international pool to join the RGFGV project. Before setting off on their individual reporting research in the region–in Egypt, Djibouti, and Erbil, the journalists participated in the workshop. Discussing problems of reporting on aspects of gender or Islam in the Middle East and Europe, they gave concrete examples they had faced in terms of “framing” the issues; a central theme that emerged in the workshop. Their professional experiences showed how American and European media standards constrain and drive the narratives that get media exposure, creating dilemmas especially when reporting on GBV. For example, covering a positive story on Muslim women can end up reproducing Orientalist assumptions in the realm of public opinion.

Rema Hammami, an anthropologist who faced similar problems representing domestic violence in the Middle East offered her own “how to report on GBV” list: individualize specific men as perpetrators; treat horror stories as unique; highlight women’s agency and homegrown solutions; show cases of modernity as the problem and tradition offering solutions. Others added: show how the category and many of the practices that fall under GBV are tied to contemporary state institutions, political economic conditions, and dynamics such as war-induced migration.

The varied backgrounds of the workshop participants also led to a consensus that exploring governance and resource distribution are key to understanding the global GBV agenda. Why do issues suddenly surface as resourced research questions? How are academic studies, activism, and governmental concern shaped by geopolitical developments? Who are the players and the experts? Who is not served by these agendas? Mapping the emergence of what Abu-Lughod called securofeminists in the counterterrorism industry or exposing the shadowy forces backing the U.S. Republican obsession with “honor killing” provides evidence of how feminists and politicians are profiting, politically and financially, from conjoining Islamophobia and GBV. In contexts of wars and occupation, resources assigned to “saving Muslim women” have often led to increased militarization with harmful consequences for women and others, including the suppression of dissent, the ahistoricization and de-contextualization of GBV and the undermining of local women activists. Hammami’s analysis focused on how international humanitarianism privileges resources for anti-GBV pedagogy amid the destruction and destitution of Gaza enabling it to colonize local activisms, misrepresenting activists’ calls to the world while undermining more relevant local projects. Her account provided sobering evidence of how the global GBV agenda can place “off-limits” urgent demands for political justice and transformation by populations subjected to acute forms of state violence.

A political economy of fear that dehumanizes certain populations according to their religious, racial, or cultural backgrounds shapes many of the contexts of violence in the regions the workshop discussed. This political economy of fear justifies material resources that fund the global GBV agenda, embedding racism, sectarianism, and imperial interests in too many of the programs meant to combat gender violence. Cross-regional discussion of humanitarian GBV, the NGO-ization of gender issues, and the politics of international aid revealed how political violence gets occluded by the human rights framework in which GBV and VAW are situated. Local development practitioners, legal advocates, and activists in the group (Aziz, Haram, Ghandour, Ghosheh) gave disturbing evidence of the influence of donor culture in the work they are attempting to do. They insisted on the agency of actors on the ground and detailed the complex, and often contradictory, political, theoretical, and structural issues they must negotiate.

Sara Ababneh drew attention to the ways feminist methodology, active listening, and attentiveness to experiences of women and girls could contribute to more robust definitions of GBV. The position of the girl child was given careful attention. How do historical and present contexts of colonization dictate legal and social policies to protect her or to oppress her? In Bangladesh, Dina Siddiqi described the way donors and local feminists may, in the name of protection or productivity, be undermining girls’ sexual agency. In Occupied East Jerusalem, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian demonstrated, the sacralized theology of the Israeli state frames girls as security threats in order to justify bodily harm and suppression of their rights. In Jordan, legal advocates have been debating the merits of laws about marrying one’s rapist, given the structure of current alternatives. To what extent should the voices of girls and women be used to define and redefine GBV?

Participants were exhilarated by the honest critical exchange of experiences, ideas, and knowledge during this workshop. They shared a commitment to advancing understanding of the challenges faced by those who feel the urgency of addressing gender violence. The workshop closed with two memorable activities: invitations to a private viewing of Widad Kawar’s collection of Palestinian and Jordanian women’s dress at Tiraz and a dinner hosted by Nissreen Haram to introduce the group to the wider dynamic scene in Amman of lawyers, artists, scholars, politicians, activists, social philanthropists, and entrepreneurs.

Supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, RGFGV partnered with the Columbia Global Center | Middle East, Amman for this workshop. CSSD projects on Women Creating Change are committed to internationalizing scholarship and knowledge. Previous projects such as Women Mobilizing Memory, Gender and the Global Slum, and Social Justice after the Welfare State have partnered with Columbia’s Global Centers in Istanbul, Mumbai, and Paris to further this goal. RGFGV is co-directed by Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, Janet Jakobsen, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. For the workshop program, click here.

This report contributed by Joymala Hajra.

Amal Ghandour

Columbia Global Center | Middle East, Amman

Artist/architect Nisreen Abu Dail at Tiraz Center

Samira Shackle, Dina Siddiqi, Lila Abu-Lughod

Joymala Hajra, Samira Shackle at Tiraz Center

Leti Volpp

Rema Hammami, Leti Volpp, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Sara Ababneh, Wafa Al Khadra, Lila, Hadeel Aziz, Hala Ghosheh

Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, Shahla Talebi

Shahla Talebi

Professor Ed Morales publishes articles on The New York Times and The Nation

Professor Ed Morales, faculty fellow of CSSD project Unpayable Debt, published several articles on the humanitarian crises facing Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. His articles illustrate the catastrophic effects of the storm and the resilience of its battered, yet defiant, residents.

“With so much loss, there was a gain, though. The community organized so quickly, with brigades clearing the roads and tending to the elderly, the sick and those who’d lost the roof over their heads. Some time may pass before cell towers restore the virtual community, but now, more than ever, the actual community is resoundingly “presente.” – Ed Morales

Read Morales’ article “Puerto Rico in the Dark,” in The New York Times here.

Click here to read Morales’ article “In Puerto Rico, Disconnection and Chaos but Grace Under Pressure,” in The Nation.

Paige West wins Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award

The Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award is funded by the office of the Provost. It will be awarded annually by the Press to a book by a Columbia University faculty member that brings the highest distinction to Columbia University and Columbia University Press for its outstanding contribution to academic and public discourse.

The 2017 award winner is Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea, by Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University. Professor West is a Project Director for CSSD project Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics.

About Dispossession and the Environment:
When journalists, developers, surf tourists, and conservation NGOs cast Papua New Guineans as living in a prior nature and prior culture, they devalue their knowledge and practice, facilitating their dispossession. Paige West’s searing study reveals how a range of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today’s globalized world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust understanding of the ideological work that capital requires for constant regeneration.

“The Economics of Precision Medicine and Disparities in Health,” a talk by Dr. Kristopher Hult

The second Fall 2017 talk of the CSSD working group Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture (PMEPC) featured Dr. Kristopher Hult. In his presentation, “The Economics of Precision Medicine and Disparities in Health,” Dr. Hult shared his research and outlook on the potential of personalized medicine to increase the health impact of existing treatments, and thereby improve patient outcomes.

Balancing Treatment Efficacy and Risk

Dr. Hult used multiple sclerosis (MS), a progressive autoimmune neurological disorder, to highlight how personalized medicine may be able to improve clinical care. Existing therapies for MS differ considerably regarding their efficacy and risk of side effects between patients, making accurate assessment of patients’ individual responses highly valuable. For example, Tysabri, a leading immunosuppressive drug, can lead to progressive multifocal encephalopathy (PML), a debilitating neurodegenerative illness; however, the risk varies over 10-fold across patients. Through using genetic information and other molecular biomarkers, such effective medications can be targeted to patients who have the lowest risk, helping balance treatment efficacy and risk.

Innovations and the Market

Dr. Hult also presented a case for the potential of incremental innovations on existing FDA approved molecules or therapy. He discussed a quantitative model to assess the effects of policy interventions on innovations and how existing policy to incentivize orphan diseases can differentially affect incremental innovation with respect to novel innovation. While such policies have spearheaded the creation of new therapies, they can also lead to corporate exclusivity, increasing the market price and reducing subsequent innovation. In addition, the promise of exclusivity may further encourage corporate entities to utilize precision medicine approaches to find novel biomarkers, so that they can show that their agent is effective for a narrower segment of the population and thereby market it as an “orphan drug.” The long-term implications of such approaches on pharmaceutical innovation and patient care are unclear at present. Ultimately, evaluating the effects of novel vs. incremental innovation requires comprehensive understanding of the factors that determine health outcomes, such as the impact of a drug on the length and quality of life, cost of the drug, and accessibility of the drug and insurance. However, as Dr. Hult acknowledged, the medical actionability of a disease is ever-shifting, making it difficult to accurately estimate these values.

Precision Prevention

The potential of personalized and precision medicine extends beyond the population who are already sick. It also has the promise to identify healthy individuals at risk, and prevent disease through targeted therapy, with “precision prevention” practiced on a broader scale. However, doing so involves significant financial considerations, and as healthcare spending continues to rise, there is a need to accurately measure the cost efficacy of the interventions proposed. As health systems across the globe shift to policies that prioritize value as well as volume, such considerations are of prime importance. As Dr. Hult noted, personalized medicine promises to revolutionize the production and targeting of pharmacotherapy, and his talk provided a valuable economic perspective on how to evaluate its impact on healthcare innovation and outcomes.

Contributed by Neha Dagaonkar and Emily Groopman

Support WOMEN CREATING CHANGE: Columbia Giving Day is October 18, 2017

Women Creating Change sits within the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD). Women Creating Change engages distinguished feminist scholars from diverse fields throughout Columbia University who focus on contemporary global problems affecting women and on the roles women play in addressing those problems.

Learn more about supporting Women Creating Change this October 18, 2017 on the Giving Day website: https://givingday.columbia.edu/pages/women-creating-change

CLICK HERE TO MAKE A GIFT TODAY!

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Director of CSSD "Unpayable Debt" Project, speaks out on the racism and injustice underlying the crisis in Puerto Rico and the failure of the administration's response

Professor Frances Negrón-Muntaner, faculty director of CSSD project Unpayable Debt, and former director of CSSD affiliate Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, published several articles on the humanitarian crises facing Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, arguing that these crises are compounded by colonialist policies.

"Puerto Ricans can do without a reluctant visit by a president that they can't vote for and gratuitously attacks them. Instead, what the island needs is immediate life-saving resources, a comprehensive reconstruction package, equity in all federal programs, debt relief, and, at last, the abolition of the entire colonial apparatus." - Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Read Negrón-Muntaner's article "Puerto Rico was Undergoing a Humanitarian Crisis Long Before Hurricane Maria" in the Pacific Standard here.

Read her article "The Crisis in Puerto Rico is a Racial Issue - Here's Why" in The Root here.

Read her article "The Last Emperor," published by Univision, here.

Former CSSD Director Rachel Adams working toward Masters in Genetic Counseling

Former CSSD Director Rachel Adams working toward Masters in Genetic Counseling

Former Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) Rachel Adams, who is currently a Faculty Director of the CSSD Precision Medicine project (co-directed by Maya Sabatello, LLB, PhD, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons), is taking her interdisciplinary research interests to the next level:

"I'm starting an experiment of unknown duration and outcome. I'm a mid-career American literature professor who has decided to learn science. More specifically, I'm taking the prerequisites for a Masters' program in genetic counseling, which I hope to complete at some undetermined time in the future." - Rachel Adams, Director of CSSD's Precision Medicine project

Adams will be documenting her experience working toward a new Masters degree in genetic counseling - you can follow her progress on Medium here.

A Human Origin Story in the Age of Biotech, Race, and Science: A Talk with Priscilla Wald

Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University, presented her talk “Cells, Genes and Stories: HeLa and the Patenting of Life” as part of the CSSD project Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture, followed by a discussion with the Precision Medicine working group in September.

A Particular Narrative of Human Origins
The discussion challenged the working group to consider the following: What does it mean to be human in the age of biotechnology? What defines being human? Is there a delineation, by which we are human on one side and non-human on the other?

Dr. Wald pushes these fundamentally humanistic questions to the forefront, and asks us to question why they matter. Why is our human-ness important to distinguish? In a thought-provoking account of the ethically-charged events surrounding the history of genetic engineering, she suggests a compelling human need to create a narrative about our origins – a narrative about the origin of humanity.

Among anthropologic creation myths and religious creation stories, scientific evolution is itself a particular narrative and attempt to understand ourselves and our place in this world. Modern genetics enables us to reach our arm further into our origin and kinship stories than before. To be part of some broader meaning is a potent need, and the methods we use to understand who we are as a species need careful consideration.

Social Fears and Biotechnology
These human questions are echoed in our concerns about new genetic technologies – we carry our social fears and taboos like a sack, passing it from new biotechnology to biotechnology. The exact set of questions which probe technology’s implications for our “humanity,” “being human,” and “sacred life” follow us. What is once unthinkably horrific at its advent – organ transplantation, IVF reproduction, and now genetic tinkering and artificial wombs – becomes medicalized and mundane with implementation. Without particularly negative technological repercussions, we forget and move the sack of concerns forward onto the next potential biotech invention.

Questions of patenting and intellectual ownership of living molecules have risen to prominence in the legal sphere during the last few decades, alongside the rise of biotechnology’s presence in science and our lives. Diamond v Chakrabarty (the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the living nature of a genetically-modified organism is no bar to patentable subject matter) and Moore v Regents (a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that denied a property ownership right to one’s cells) both herald the shape of legal questions to come in this new age of biotech commercialization.

Race, Genetics, and Racism
If there is one pressing certainty that arose from the discourse, it is that we cannot venture further into this future of new genetic capabilities without understanding the deeply social implications of its effects. Race is a social category, not a biological one – yet genetics plays centrally into many racist narratives. Racism as much as race affects health outcomes. Humans are 99.9% identical, but it is the 0.1% that is most often explored, plumbed for its depths, and commercialized. 23&Me and similar genetic analysis organizations capitalize on this interest, rising to meet demand for an ethnographic narrative of our origins, but falling far short of providing real accuracy or insight for what individuals seek to discover about themselves.

The truth that may be most difficult to remember in the coming years of the Genetic Age is that we are not a sole product of our genetics. We are an amalgamation of our genetics, environment, society, and the complex interactions and reactions of those dimensions in epigenetics. Dr. Wald convincingly pushes us to return to questions about which particular narrative is being advanced about human origins, ‘us versus them’ kinship groups, and the motivations that underlie the narrative and why.

Science, Media, and the Markets
Social and institutional power structures determine who decides what is done with the data, and what stories are told about the data. Modern genetics is a form of biopolitics and power. When technology is controlled by capitalism, and when it is for commercial use or entertainment, who will pay for the technology becomes a defining question.

Above all, this discussion surfaced a highly persuasive case for cross-collaborations of the humanities and science, most especially in the communication of genetics research to the public – a conclusion that affirms this working group’s essential purpose and need. Linguistics, English, Philosophy, and their sister-humanities disciplines provide the insight and expertise on the medium by which all information is mediated and communicated: language. It is a medium that can be both uplifting and beautified, or subverted and yoked for alternate purposes. In communicating science to the media and public, we share the burden of responsibility for ensuring an accurate education.

Contributed by Jade Tan

PUBLISHED: "A Room of Their Own" by Susan Meiselas.

A Room of Their Own by Susan Meiselas, a member of the Reframing Gendered Violence working group, has been published by Multistory and is available at the Magnum Photos Store.

The book of photos chronicles the experience of residents in a women’s refuge in Black Country, a multi-ethnic, post-industrial region in the West Midlands, UK. After Meiselas was invited to photograph the residents she developed a collaborative project with the women who were willing to share their stories.

View some of the photos here and purchase the book here.

CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch writes about her experience as a "stateless" child

Marianne Hirsch, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD), wrote about her experience as a "stateless" child and the importance of protecting the rights of those who have received legal status through DACA and those who qualify to apply.

"At 11, I left communist Romania with my parents. Upon our emigration, our citizenship was revoked; the state I.D. card replaced by a little booklet with our pictures, a travel permit. On the paper, our nationality was marked as 'stateless.'" - Marianne Hirsch

Read Hirsch's article in the Los Angeles Review of Books here.

Lila Abu-Lughod joins amicus brief against the Executive Order on the "Muslim Ban"

Lila Abu-Lughod, a director of the CSSD projects Reframing Gendered Violence and Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence, joined several scholars in an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in the case by Muslim Advocates against the Executive Order on the "Muslim Ban."

Her research in Do Muslim Women Need Saving? supported the argument that invoking "honor killings" in the Executive Order indicates animus toward one religious group.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, CSSD Project Director, interviewed about Rohingya refugee disaster

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, CSSD Project Director, interviewed about Rohengy refugee disaster

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, director of the CSSD Rural-Urban Interface project, was interviewed about the Rohingya refugee disaster for TBS eFM's "This Morning" English radio program in Seoul, Korea.

Spivak's interview is available for online listening here.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner Profiled on Univision

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of CSSD's working group on Unpayable Debt and award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, was profiled on Univision.

Professor Negrón-Muntaner's books and publications include: Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts (forthcoming). Her most recent films include "Small City, Big Change" (2013), "War for Guam" (2015) and "Life Outside" (2016).

Watch the Univision profile here.

Reframing Gendered Violence Project Featured in EuropeNow Journal

CSSD's project on Reframing Gendered Violence was featured in the July issue of EuropeNow, which was dedicated to "The Gender of Power."

EuropeNow, an art and research journal published by Columbia's Council for European Studies, showcased the project's four public events and workshops this past academic year, which focused on the issues surrounding the discussion of violence against women and gender-based violence.

Read the full article here.