CSSD Members Participated in Faculty Roundtable "On Feminism and Palestine" on Dec. 4

CSSD Interim Director Lila Abu-Lughod, Transnational Black Feminisms co-director Premilla Nadasen, Insurgent Domesticities co-director Neferti X. M. Tadiar, and former Queer Aquí director Jack Halberstam — among others — participated in a faculty roundtable discussion titled “On Feminism and Palestine” this past Monday.

This event was co-sponsored and co-presented by Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Center for Palestine Studies, Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Iulia Stătică Publishes New Text in Routledge Architext Series: Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest (Routledge, 2023)

Iulia Stătică, member of the Insurgent Domesticities Working Group, has recently published Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest (Routledge, 2023), as a part of Routledge’s Architext series.

From Routledge: “Urban Phantasmagorias examines the legacies of socialist housing in the city of Bucharest during the period of communist rule in Romania. The book explores the manner in which the socialist state reconfigured the city through concrete acts of demolition and construction, as well as indirectly through legal frameworks aimed at the regulation of women’s reproductive agency, in an attempt to materialize its idea of modernity. It follows the effects of this state agenda with a focus on the period between 1965 and 1989 through an investigation of the transformations, representations, meanings, and uses of domestic spaces.”

Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Members to be in Conversation at UC Berkeley's Nordic Center

On December 6, two members of the Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group, Elizabeth Löwe Hunter and Jasmine Kelekay, will be in conversation at the Nordic Center at UC Berkeley. Part of the Nordic Talks podcast, the conversation will be available after the event: The Myth of the Nordic Utopia - Social Democracy Through Afro-Nordic Perspectives.

CSSD Interim Director Lila Abu-Lughod receives the 2023 Career Award from the Association for Feminist Anthropology

CSSD Interim Director Lila Abu-Lughod received the 2023 Career Award from the Association for Feminist Anthropology on November 18, 2023, at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association held in Toronto, Canada.

Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Member Temi Odumuso Participated in Weekend of Archival Happenings at SouthNord Artfest

In late November, Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group member Temi Odumuso participated in a weekend of archival happenings at the SouthNord Artfest at Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Sweden.  She was part of a mini-seminar in collaboration with the Ethnographic Museum on the history of black people in the Nordics.

Seeds of Diaspora Co-Director Lynnette Widder Awarded a 2023 Architecture + Design Independent Projects Grant

CSSD wishes to congratulate Seeds of Diaspora co-director Lynnette Widder for being awarded a 2023 Architecture + Design Independent Projects grant for her project, "Rogue Plants, Native Soils: Histories of Destruction and its Opposites."

For more information on both the project and the grant itself, follow this link.

Refugee Cities WG member Kian Tajbakhsh in Discussion with Gillian Triggs at "Mobilizing Action Toward the Global Compact on Refugees"

Refugee Cities working group member and Senior Advisor for the Committee on Forced Migration, Kian Tajbakhsh, participated in a discussion with Gillian Triggs, assistant high commissioner for protection with UNHCR ( United Nations refugee agency), on November 13. Titled “Mobilizing Action Toward the Global Compact on Refugees,” the event addressed topics such as new developments in global displacement & refugee protection, multi-stakeholder partnerships & innovative solutions, the Global Compact, and more.

Read more about this past event here.

Recap: Extractive Media hosts Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris on Nov. 15

On Wednesday, November 15, the Extractive Media working group hosted Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris, the Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, for a conversation on her new essay "Un-Earthing Extractive Architectures," which was recently published in e-flux Architecture.

The event was followed by a dinner at Lido in Harlem. 

For the original Events page for this seminar, follow this link.

In attendance at dinner, from L to R: Extractive Media co-chair Debashree Mukherjee,  Professor Reinhold Martin, Professor Jane Gaines, Professor Macarena Gómez-Barris, PhD student Cecília Resende Santos, Extractive Media graduate coordinator Hannah Pivo, Extractive Media co-chair Zeynep Çelik Alexander.

Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Members Delivery Keynote at Copenhagen Conference

Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group members Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo, Lena Sawyer, and Jasmine Kelekay gave a collective keynote at a conference on "Engaging with diversity work as atmospheric work" in Copenhagen on November 28th. They presented the talk as members of Kollektiv Omsorg, based on their recent article "Writing Letters as Counter-Archiving: An Afro-Nordic Feminist Care Practice" which was published in the Meridians special issue on BIPOC Europe, which was co-edited by AfroNordic Feminisms group member Nana Osei-Kofi and Shirley Tate. 

Recap: Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group Meeting from Nov. 9-12

The Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group met in New York from 9-12 November.

Our conversations ranged around the terms that animate our group: "Afro," "Nordic" and "Feminism"; in addition, we shared our work with each other in order to plan a concrete project or set of interventions that our group will engage in during spring of 2024 and the future. We are exploring the following possibilities: 1) a panel at the Scandinavian Studies Association in Seattle in May in conversation with the Nordic Utopias exhibition at the National Nordic Museum; 2) a possible project mapping the genealogy of AfroNordic Feminist scholars and their work 3) staging a series of conversations amongst ourselves in either podcast or textual form about the challenges of doing this work in the US/Nordics, scholarly positionality, language justice in the field, among other topics.

Afro-Nordic Feminisms WG Members Contribute to Special Issue of Kvinder, Køn og Forskning

Two members of the Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group, Elizabeth Löwe Hunter and Oda-Kange Midtvåge Diallo, contributed to a special issue of the academic journal Kvinder, Køn og Forskning on Racialization and Racism in Denmark, which was recently published. It includes articles in English as well as Danish and a panel discussion on research and education in which Löwe Hunter and Midtvåge Diallo participated.

CSSD Member Joins Over 100 University Professors in Criticizing "Principles of Solidarity. A Statement" Signed by Jürgen Habermas and Others

Extractive Media working group member and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia, Rosalind C. Morris, joined over a hundred university faculty from around the world in criticizing and condemning the November 13 statement on the Israel-Gaza War published on the website of the Normative Orders research center at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther and Jürgen Habermas are among the signatories of the original statement.

For more on this story, read here.

Professor Zeynep Çelik Alexander to Delivery Lecture at e-flux Tonight Entitled "Paper Beats Rock: The Imperial Institute's Media"

e-flux Architecture presents a lecture with Extractive Media working group co-director Zeynep Çelik Alexander entitled “Paper Beats Rock: The Imperial Institute’s Media,” at e-flux on Thursday, November 16 at 7pm.

Follow the registration link below for more information from the e-flux Architecture Lecture series webpage.

CSSD Members Join Feminist Call to Stop Genocide and Occupation in Palestine

Among many members of the Center for the Study of Social Difference who have shown their support for the end to Palestinian Genocide, scholars Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Marissa Solomon, and Miriam Ticktin from the Recovery working group have signed on to a recent collective letter of 1,200 signatories from feminist, queer, and trans studies, advocating for the end of the genocide and occupation and a call to free Palestine.

Read the letter here.

Sarover Zaidi from Insurgent Domesticities Participates in Panel at South Asia in Translation Conference

Insurgent Domesticities working group member Professor Sarover Zaidi participated in a panel discussion titled “Translation, Memory, and South Asian Cartographies” on the second day of the South Asia in Translation: Geography, Memory, and Textuality conference held in October of this year.

Professor Zaidi’s talk in this panel was entitled “Horizons, Courtyards and the Languages of Architecture” and focused on the evolution of Indian Ocean geographies, centered around the city of Mumbai.

Motherhood & Technology WG Co-Directors to Guest-Edit Special Issue of The Journal of Medical Humanities

Motherhood and Technology Working Group Co-Directors, Arden Hegele and Rishi Goyal, are guest-editing a special issue of The Journal of Medical Humanities, planned to release in summer 2024. Entitled “Conception and Its Discontents,” and drawing its contributors from an eponymous conference held by the Working Group in May 2023, the issue will explore the pressures and deformations that burgeoning technologies and contemporary political and cultural norms place on the experience and meaning of reproduction. Articles will consider how technologies of reproduction have been taken up without full recognition of their political, legal, sociocultural, biological, or psychoanalytical impacts.

Ana Paulina Lee & Geographies of Injustice Share New Collaborative Podcast Project

Ana Paulina Lee, in conjunction with the Geographies of Injustice working group at CSSD, have shared their most recent collaborative project made with the Rio De Janeiro Candomblé temple, Ilê Omolu Oxum. Those interviewed in this series recuperate the history of their ancestors who were taken into slavery while discussing the current work of maintaining ties to the Candomblé religion and Yoruba diaspora. The podcasts produced from this collective effect are available in Portuguese.

An English translation is available as well.

Paige West & Pacific Climate Circuits Have Published a New Paper in Oryx Journal

Paige West and the Pacific Climate Circuits working group have published a new paper entitled “Reimagining Conservation Practice: Indigenous self-determination and collaboration in Papua New Guinea” earlier this year in the journal Oryx, the International Journal of Conservation published by Cambridge University. The paper focuses on Indigenous community-based conservation methods and is the first to be co-authored by a combination of scholars and activists from Papua New Guinea, the United States, as well as Indigenous Elders from New Ireland.

On the Spatial Design Research of S. E. Eisterer, Member of the Insurgent Domesticities WG

Click this link to read about the fascinating work of Insurgent Domesticities Woking Group member S. E. Eisterer, featured in Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Upcoming Book Release: Architecture of Migration by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

Forthcoming from Duke University Press, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (2023) is the latest publication from Professor Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, the co-director of Insurgent Domesticities and member the Refugee Cities working group. Expected to be released in December, 2023, Architecture of Migration critically challenges humanitarian narratives in architecture, planning, and global crisis management. Ethnographic research conducted with camp residents and aid workers exposes the realities within supposedly temporary camps, now turned into lasting urban settlements. The text’s recounting of histories detail the spatial stories of lives affected by colonialism and political, economic, and environmental turmoil. Siddiqi provides a unique examination of how neoliberal policies impede the development of spaces for the world's vulnerable populations.