Professor Marisa Solomon Explores the Correlation Between Proximity to Waste and Fugitive Gender Articulations in Recent Research Publication
On October 1, 2022, Marisa Solomon, co-director of the Black Atlantic Ecologies working group and assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies, shared her recent scholarly work in GLQ (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies).
On October 1, 2022, Marisa Solomon, co-director of the Black Atlantic Ecologies working group and assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies, shared her recent scholarly work in GLQ (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies). Entitled "Ecologies Elsewhere: Flyness, Fill, and Black Women's Fugitive Matter(s)," the article delves beyond conventional environmental perspectives, focusing on spaces where existence is intricately tied to waste in various forms.
Emerging from a broader investigation into the anti-Black geographies of "long-distance" waste management, Solomon argues that waste infrastructure upholds the value of white properties while simultaneously creating marginalized spaces of Black dispossession. Through her analysis, she contends that acts such as stealing, salvaging, narrating, and laboring with waste serve as critiques of how property organizes the world. These practices, she posits, are ecological strategies developed outside conventional frameworks.
Lilian Chee releases trailer for upcoming film Objects for Thriving, in collaboration with Ian Mun
Objects for Thriving (2022) fleshes out the complexity of lived worlds in ordinary domestic objects. It focuses on the capacity of such objects to behave as affective mediators and repositories of experiences and events. A Butterfly sewing machine, a granite pestle and mortar set, and household talismans and altars, are equally ordinary and extraordinary. The setting for each object—within a domestic space–changes the nature of how these are perceived. They are involved in identity formations, ritual continuity, meaning making. As instruments embodying histories (personal, social, cultural), they are ordinary forms of heritage which continue to evolve and to matter in the everyday. They are instruments for living, or what we term ‘objects for thriving.’
The short documentary is an observational and essayistic document where research findings take on an unusual and organic form of discovery and semi-enactment, made in tandem with the participants who revisit the objects which they deem important. The meaning(s) in video-documentation are ‘emic’; they are not predetermined but emanate from the encounters between filmed subjects and the filmmaker. These ideas of memory and heritage are thus co-created by the relationships between the filmed subject, the filmmakers and the difference audiences. It empowers participant identification and builds audience empathy. The objects enmesh protocols, systems and technologies of survival, belief and ideologies. The title—Objects for Thriving—alludes to the roles these objects play in giving independence, identity and expression to the elders who are their custodians
Media: https://www.lilianchee.com/film-objectsforthriving
Annapurna Garimella appears on podcast The Seen and the Unseen for an episode entitled “Objects Speak”
The world is what it is -- but no one knows what that is, and we all see different worlds. Designer and art historian Annapurna Garimella joins Amit Varma in episode 257 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe her passage of seeing, remembering, reflecting.
Organizers: The Seen and Unseen
Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSjLonaPwHU&ab_channel=TheSeenandtheUnseen
Akira Drake Rodriguez discusses new book Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing at Cornell AAP
In 1936, the City of Atlanta was the first U.S. city to open federally-financed and locally-administered public housing developments to low-income families in need of safe and sanitary housing (Techwood Homes). For the city's Black residents, and later, other marginalized groups, these developments provided political opportunity to assemble, mobilize, and make claims on the State in ways that were otherwise inaccessible. Over time, tenant associations served as conduits for working-class political interests centered in spatial justice – the very politics of planning that were used to segregate and marginalize developments and residents served as an organizing logic around spatial justice issues. However, in 2013, demolition began on one of the city's last public housing developments for low-income families, nearly two decades after Techwood Homes was demolished for the 1996 Olympics. This talk examines the historical role of public housing in working-class politics and how the loss of tenant associations in the city has deepened contemporary inequities.
Organized by: Cornell AAP (Architecture Art Planning)
Media: https://aap.cornell.edu/news-events/akira-drake-rodriguez-diverging-space-deviants-politics-atlantas-public-housing
Jennifer Hirsch’s Research Cited in USA Today Article
The article, “Why it’s still so hard not to drink,” discusses alcohol, power dynamics, and privilege.
Former co-director for the CSSD Working Group Reframing Gendered Violence, Jennifer Hirsch, and sociologist Shamus Khan's research was cited in a USA Today article on alcohol consumption. The piece highlighted Professors Hirsch and Khan's findings on how college campus drinking culture is shaped by power dynamics and privilege.
The USA Today article can be found here.
To learn more about Jennifer Hirsch, you can visit her page on the CSSD website here.
For more on her work with the CSSD Working Group, Reframing Gendered Violence, read here.
Mae Ngai Launches “Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas”
CSSD Executive Committee member celebrated the launch of her and her colleague’s interactive digital atlas of NYC.
CSSD Executive Committee Member Mae Ngai and collaborator Rebecca Kobrin inaugurated their project on October 27, 2021. The "Mapping Historical New York" project offers interactive visualizations of census data at the household level on maps of New York City from 1850 to 1910. The project received funding from the Gardiner Foundation. Mae collaborated with historian Rebecca Kobrin
A recording of the launch can be found here.
More information about Mae Ngai and her work can be found on her CSSD page, here.
Zip Code Memory Project Gathering for Covid
CSSD Social Engagement Project organizes an event for community mourning and healing that will take place on December 5th, 2021.
Join the participants of the CSSD Social Engagement Project, The Zip Code Memory Project, on December 5 on the steps of the Cathedral of St John the Divine for our first public gathering to acknowledge, mourn, and pay tribute to the losses of COVID 19.
Combining the physical and the digital, this community gathering will include candles, music, postcards and a healing community ritual. This event will center postcards participants may have sent, brought, or made at the event that responds to the questions:
What have we lost and learned from Covid?
How can we heal and grow together?
More information about this event can be found on the official Zip Code Memory project page here.
For more information on the work of The Zip Code Memory Project, you can visit the CSSD page here.
Ife Salema Vanable gives Under Construction Lecture entitled “Nothing Even Matters” at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Nothing Even Matters tells a tale at the critical intersection of historical analysis and theoretical speculation as a way to interrogate how modes of architectural production are operative parts of the same project that has historically, and continues to mutate, to produce varying ideas about racial difference. These alignments are not merely material, they constitute a discursive system, an aesthetic and sociotechnical mode of operation that orders the world in particular ways. Simultaneously anonymous and outstanding, this talk engages Mitchell-Lama housing—a strategically crafty and impactful experiment in a long line of housing schemes hatched in New York, enacted in 1955, targeting middle-income black families. Recognized as an alternative program, complicating post-war histories of housing, Nothing Even Matters shares Ife Salema Vanable’s ongoing study of Mitchell-Lama housing, charting its hybridity, the simultaneous ambiguity and specificity with which the terms of its production have been managed (“middle-income,” “family,” “household), the ways that its objects (high-rise residential towers) aesthetically deviate from and challenge expectations for how black bodies are to be physically and materially housed, and the varied sanctioned, unauthorized, ingenious, pleasurable, sensuous, and particularly quotidian forms of occupancy black bodies have waged behind and beyond their facades.
Media: https://arch.umd.edu/events/under-construction-lecture-ife-salema-vanable
Naomi Stead in conversation with artist Sarah Rodigari, “Walking, Talking, and Accountability”
Walking, Talking and Accountability’ Sarah Rodigari, artist, in conversation with Dr Naomi Stead, architecture critic and Professor of Architecture, Department of Architecture, Monash University Sydney-based artist Sarah Rodigari and architecture critic, Professor Naomi Stead (Monash Department of Architecture) engage in a speculative conversation about performative walking, the art of conversation and queering as a process and a practice. An artist who creates site-specific performances and text-based installations, Sarah’s performance installation 'On Time', 2021, was included in 'The National 2021' at Carriageworks in Sydney. Sarah also speaks about a recent residency with Monash Business School.
Organizers: Monash University of Art, Design, and Architecture
Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwUvUbVVlUI&ab_channel=MonashUniversityArt%2CDesign%26Architecture
Katherine Franke in Vox
Columbia Law Professor Franke commented on new US legislation to combat anti-Asian hate crimes.
In an article on the intent and anticipated implications of the US House of Representatives bill to improve data tracking of anti-Asian hate crimes, Professor Franke told Vox: “Enhancing criminal prosecutions of and requiring greater reporting on hate crimes are interventions that take place after bias incidents have taken place. Education, public messaging — particularly from elected officials — and other community-based programs aimed at reconciliation and repair are more likely to reduce the incidence of hate crimes.” Read the full article here.
Professor Franke, Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project. She is a member of the current CSSD working groups Queer Aqui and former working groups Reframing Gendered Violence and Science and Social Difference.
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan on Radio Open Source
Professor Sivaramakrishnan shared her expertise on the COVID-19 crisis in India.
Kavita Savaramakrishnan shared her historical and sociomedical expertise on the COVID-19 public health crisis in India on the Radio Open Source podcast. Listen to the full episode here.
Sivaramakrishnan is Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and a member of CSSD’s Insurgent Domesticities working group.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne in Christian Science Monitor
Professor Diagne commented on the Nairobi National Museum’s new exhibit highlighting the Kenyan art stolen in the colonial era.
Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne commented on the Nairobi National Museum’s new “Invisible Inventories” exhibit highlighting the European colonial-era theft of Kenyan art. Professor Diagne told Christan Science Monitor: “The movement is snowballing. There’s a public pressure now that wasn’t there before.”
Professor Diagne, a Senegalese philosopher and Columbia professor of Philosophy and French, was a member of CSSD’s working group Bandung Humanisms.
Vanessa Agard-Jones Lectures on Ephemera at Wesleyan University
In “Empirical Ephemera,” Professor Agard-Jones used the concept-metaphor of sand to consider how coloniality is made material.
Assistant Professor Vanessa Agard-Jones gave a lecture on “Empirical Ephemera” at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities. She explored the ways that colonality is made material, and how we might use sand as a tool for thinking an ephemeral archive, empirically.
Agard-Jones is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia, co-director of CSSD’s Black Atlantic Ecologies working group, and member of the Queer Aqui and former Reframing Gendered Violence and Science and Social Difference working groups.
Meredith Gamer Lectures at Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Assistant Professor Gamer’s two online lectures focused on the works of artist William Hogarth.
Assistant Professor Meredith Gamer participated in this year’s Yale University Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Artist in Focus Public Lecture Series. Professor Gamer’s lectures focused on two works by etching artist William Hogarth: Industry and Idleness (1747) and The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). Assistant Professor of Art History, Gamer is a member of CSSD’s Motherhood and Technology working group.
Watch the full lectures here.
Elections to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Congratulations to Professors Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Mabel O. Wilson on joining the Academy.
Congratulations to University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Associate Professor Mabel O. Wilson on their election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Spivak is University Professor and Founder of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia, and former co-director of CSSD working group The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories.
Wilson is Associate Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia, and a member of former CSSD working groups Engendering the Archive and Reframing Gendered Violence.
Lila Abu-Lughod Delivered A Webinar On Gender Violence
This webinar was part of a virtual event series entitled Theory From The Margins
Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, Reframing Gendered Violence working group fellow, delivered a webinar on "Gender from the Margins: The Geopolitics of Gender Violence" as part of a series hosted by the Theory from the Margins project. Professor Abu-Lughod spoke on her work, including the forthcoming collection The Cunning of Gender Violence.
Check out the Webinar Here.
Office of the Provost Mid-Career Faculty Grant
Congratulations to Spring 2021 Grant awardees Kevin Fellezs (Music), Natasha Lightfoot (History), and Camille Robcis (French, History).
We are pleased to congratulate CSSD working group members Kevin Fellezs, Natasha Lightfoot and Camille Robcis on receiving a Spring 2021 Columbia Office of the Provost Mid-Career Faculty Grant in recognition of significant contributions to their fields.
Kevin Fellezs received the grant for his work on The Love Song in Black Popular Music, 1945-2000. He is Associate Professor of Music, Ethnomusicology & African American & African Diaspora Studies and former co-director of CSSD’s Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics working group.
Assistant Professor Natasha Lightfoot received the grant for work on her project, Fugitive Cosmopolitans and the Making of the Black Atlantic. She teaches Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History, and was a member of CSSD’s former Digital Black Atlantic working group.
Associate Professor Camille Robcis received the grant for her forthcoming project, tentatively titled The Gender Question: Populism, National Reproduction, and the Crisis of Representation, in which she explores the protests against the so-called “theory of gender” and their conceptual links to populism. She teaches modern European intellectual history, and is a member of CSSD working group Queer Aqui.
Saidiya Hartman Receives PEN America Literary Award
Professor Hartman was announced as one of the 2021 Award Winners for her recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.
Saidiya Hartman Receives PEN America Literary Award
We are pleased to congratulate Saidiya Hartman, former co-director of the Gender & the Global Slum and Engendering the Archive working groups, on receiving a PEN America Literary Award for her recent book. Professor Hartman was a recipient of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction for her book entitled Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.
Read more about her book and this special distinction here.