CSSD Working Group Director Tami Navarro in Conversation with Columbia faculty and former CSSD working group member about Navarro's recent book
Putting Race to Work:
Neoliberal Development in the US Virgin Islands
Tami Navarro and Natasha Lightfoot will discuss Navarro's book Virgin Capital, which explores racial capitalism and the failures of neoliberal development in the Caribbean and beyond. With their shared intellectual engagement in the region, this conversation will touch on the past, present, and possible futures of islands in the Caribbean.
Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands by Tami Navarro
When: Thursday, 12:15pm–2:00pm EDT on April 27, 2023
Where: The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University
To register for the event see more here [link to webpage of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities]
Call for Papers/Participants - Refugee Cities Symposium on the Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement
Check out the Refugee Cities Call for Papers/Paticipants for the Symposium on the Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement at Columbia University, New York, NY, April 27-28, 2023
S.E. Eisterer in conversation with Stephen Vider on his new book “The Queerness of Home”, 25 October 2022
Drawing on research from his new book, “The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World II” (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Vider will trace the history of two radical experiments of the 1970s—Phyllis Birkby’s lesbian architecture project and Survival House, an early group home for queer and trans homeless youth—to reconsider the place of domestic practices, spaces, and archives in LGBTQ history. While scholars in queer studies have largely emphasized public and commercial spaces as the primary sites of LGBTQ politics and community, Vider will argue that the intimacy of home space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life.
Stephen Vider is Assistant Professor of History and founding director of the Public History Initiative at Cornell University. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Gender & History, and The Public Historian. In 2017, Vider curated the exhibition “AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism” for the Museum of the City of New York.
S.E. Eisterer is Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Her research focuses on spatial histories of dissidence, feminist, queer, and trans theory, as well as the labor of social and ecological movements.
Organized by the Graduate Program in Media+ Modernity and Princeton University
For more information: https://www.facebook.com/MediaModernity/
Anooradha Siddiqi will be participating in a launch of the essay collection Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration, starting November 17, 2022.
Anooradha Siddiqi will be participating in a launch of the essay collection Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration at the University of Toronto on November 17, see more information here, and at Princeton University on November 21, 2022.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi to Deliver the Teetzel Lecture at the University of Toronto
Insurgent Domesticities co-director Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi will be delivering the Teetzel Lecture at the University of Toronto on November 16, 2022.
Insurgent Domesticities | Neferti X. M. Tadiar to Deliver Chadwick Lecture
Insurgent Domesticities Co-Director Neferti X.M. Tadiar to deliver the Chadwick Lecture in the Department of English, University at Hawai’i at Mānoa on October 20, 2022.
See more here
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
The Zip Code Memory Project seeks local participants for collaborative art-based project
The Zip Code Memory Project is seeking to bring together collaborative groups representing the diversity of our Washington Heights, East Harlem, Central/West Harlem, and South Bronx communities.
The Zip Code Memory Project seeks participants!
Do you live and/or work in Washington Heights, East Harlem, Central/West Harlem, or the South Bronx?
Want to participate in a creative project to explore the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on you and your community?
Let’s mourn our losses, envision new futures, and re-imagine our neighborhoods through paths of hope.
Join us as we:
Walk through our streets together to remember our loved ones as we tell stories about them.
Use and take photos to create stories, memorial stamps, postcards, and scrapbooks to share with others.
Engage in acting exercises to help us build trust and community.
This collaborative art-based project is envisioned to help us heal from the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic, and its unequal effects on our communities. Through workshops and public events we will acknowledge the trauma, grief, and loss of the pandemic while celebrating and, we hope, energizing the spaces we live in.
We are seeking to bring together collaborative groups representing the diversity of our community with regard to age, race/ethnicity, citizenship status, physical ability, educational level, language, and types of
work.
The Zip Code Memory Project is sponsored by Columbia University and the Henry Luce Foundation in collaboration with a number of local community, education, and arts organizations.* There is no cost to participants. All will receive a signed certificate from the Zip Code Memory Project and its affiliated institutions upon completion.
Open to Community Members who:
Live and/or work in Washington Heights; East Harlem, Central/West Harlem, or the South Bronx:
Are at least 18yrs old or older to participate
Are willing and able to participate in four weekends of afternoon workshops over a 9-month period Oct-June, 2021-2022
Interested in participating?
Email us: zipcodememoryproject@gmail.com
MORE INFORMATION HERE.
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
Announcing the Zip Code Memory Project, supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference and The Henry Luce Foundation
The Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair (ZCMP), co-directed by Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Diana Taylor (New York University), seeks to find reparative ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic, while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on different Upper New York City neighborhoods. It is housed at the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia University and is supported by a CSSD Social Engagement grant funded by the Columbia University President’s Office. CSSD is pleased to announce that the Zip Code Memory Project is the recipient of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for a two-year term beginning July 1, 2021.
Announcing the Zip Code Memory Project, supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference and The Henry Luce Foundation
The Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair (ZCMP), co-directed by Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Diana Taylor (New York University), seeks to find reparative ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic, while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on different Upper New York City neighborhoods. In partnership with community, arts and academic organizations, and working across the zip codes of Morningside Heights, Harlem, Washington Heights and the South Bronx, this project will gather a group of scholars, artists and activists to develop a series of hands-on artistic practices that can transform and enliven those spaces. Building on the networks of care that local communities have created, this project aims to mobilize memory and repair a sense of trust that will help us all build a sense of shared responsibility and belonging.
The Zip Code Memory Project is housed at the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia University and supported by a CSSD Social Engagement grant funded by the Columbia University President’s Office. CSSD is pleased to announce that the Zip Code Memory Project is the recipient of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for a two-year term beginning July 1, 2021. These funds will serve as crucial support for the work of the ZCMP, including group meetings and discussions, reparative memory workshops, public roundtables featuring the work of reparative memorial artists, the building of an interactive website, and a final exhibition and memorial event.
Professors Hirsch and Taylor are organizing the ZCMP along with project co-conveners Susan Meiselas (Magnum Foundation), Lorie Novak (NYU), and Laura Wexler (Yale). George Emilio Sánchez (College of Staten Island) will direct the project’s participatory workshops and Maria Jose Contreras Lorenzini, Noni Carter, Jordan Cruz, Kamal Badhey, and Carina Del Valle Schorske will be among the project’s workshop leaders. Lee Xie is project manager.
The ZCMP will collaborate with local academic, arts, and community organizations including, among others, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; The Museum of the City of New York; El Museo del Barrio; The Bronx Documentary Center; City College of New York Black Studies Program and Rifkind Center for the Humanities and the Arts; Centro Civico Cultural Dominicano; The Cathedral of St. John the Divine; and Magnum Foundation.
Public Humanities and Arts Graduate Fellows working with the project include Luis Rincon Alba (NYU), Linda Aristondo (Columbia), Gabriel Carle (NYU), Bárbara Pérez Curiel (NYU), Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton (Columbia), Fadila Habchi (Yale), Kristin Hankins (Yale), Nancy Ko (Columbia), Leah Kogen-Elimeliah (CCNY), Aya Labanieh (Columbia), Guilherme Meyer (NYU/SSHRC,Canada) , Amanda Parmer (NYU), Laura Salvatore (CCNY).
With thanks for additional funding from Columbia School of the Arts; The Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities; Institute for Religion and Public Life; Yale University Public Humanities; City College of New York Rifkind Center for the Humanities and the Arts; Public Humanities Initiative of GSAS, NYU; Institute of Performing Arts, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
More information about the Zip Code Memory Project can be found on the CSSD website here and on the official Zip Code Memory project HERE.