RGFGV Media Fellow Nafeesa Syeed Publishes Article on Bloomberg.com

CSSD Project Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence held an international competition and selected three Media Fellows to receive reporting grants. They joined the project, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, and did research in the Middle East to produce innovative media stories.

Nafeesa Syeed focuses on the struggles and achievements of Yemeni women in the midst of US and Saudi-led war campaigns. Through interviews with Djibouti-based Yemeni women living in refugee camps and active young Yemeni women in Amman, Jordan, she shows how women are framing their experiences of violence and war and assessing their changing social roles. Her article ‘Women Flee a Hellscape in Yemen. Here are Their Lives Now’, highlights the way refugee women are using entrepreneurship to adapt to their new realities.

Marianne Hirsch delivers keynote address at Memory Studies Association Conference

CSSD Director Marianne Hirsch delivered the keynote address at the second annual Memory Studies Association Conference, December 15, 2017.

Hirsch’s address, “Stateless Memories”, further develops her pioneering work in the field of memory studies, calling into question the ethnocentrism of dominant memory cultures and looking instead for progressive ways of developing collective memories outside the bounds of national monuments.

Marianne Hirsch is Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, as well as William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is co-director of the CSSD projects Women Mobilizing Memory, Engendering the Archive, and Reframing Gendered Violence.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delivers inaugural lecture for International Colloquium on Creative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

CSSD project co-director Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delivered the inaugural lecture at the International Colloquium on Creative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, at Sullamussalam Science College, December 12, 2017.

Spivak’s address, which was followed by a panel discussion, “Spivak with Alternative Educators”, argued that “higher education means flexibility of imagination,” encouraging university students and faculty alike to pursue global research that extends beyond the university itself. The address is available to watch online, and further coverage is available at The Hindu.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Kenya and Ghana, Statistics and Stories. Spivak is also University Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and a founding member of CSSD affiliate the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

RGFGV Media Fellow Samira Shackle Publishes Three Articles

CSSD’s Project on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence awarded reporting grants to three Media Fellows who joined the project in September. After participating in an international workshop with scholars and activists hosted at the Columbia Global Center in Amman, they traveled in the Middle East to research stories that could reframe understandings of the relationship between gender violence and religion.

Samira Shackle published three articles on refugee women’s active responses to gender-based violence and poverty in Iraq and Lebanon.

Yazidis in Iraq: 'The genocide is ongoing'

The Refugee Whose Husband Sold Her Into Sex Slavery

Hairdressing, sewing, cooking – is this really how we're going to empower women?

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.