Black Archipelago and the Crisis of Place
We consider critically and recast responsibly narratives about how the production of Black space is foundational to imaginative Black placemaking, self-actualization, and ways to catalogue future and existing spaces.
About
Project Directors: Brandi T. Summers, Columbia University; N. D. B. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University
Working Group Members: Vanessa Agard-Jones (Anthropology), Fennet Habte (SIPA), Maya Sapienza (UC Berkeley Geography),
Black Archipelago considers critically and recasts responsibly narratives about how the production of Black space is foundational to imaginative Black placemaking, self-actualization, and ways to catalogue future and existing spaces.
Black archipelago, for us, describes islands of affinity and belonging as well as islands of predicament. The Black Archipelago also describes both Black people’s shared encounters with white supremacy as well as, more crucially, how Black people stay connected to each other, to place and to notions of blackness. Through Black Archipelago, we seek to advance collaborations and, hopefully, methodologies grappling with the many threads of domination and insurgent innovation constituting historical patterns of the Black experience. To be sure, these patterns, regardless of capitalism’s various twists and turns, have ensured certain continuities of colonial administration and have tethered imperial cultural norms to modern-day racial and gender formations among Black people.
A Black archipelago is an answer to the question of how to think about enduring crises and enduring people in the Black World. This framework allows us to pay closer attention to how scholars, activists, and artists engage the poetics and materiality of Black life to explore ideas about repair, inequality, resistance, and liberation.
Events
Alternative Modes of Being
We are scholars across disciplines focusing on Asia and Africa who seek to bring premodern knowledge traditions, epistemologically decolonized, into dialogue with social and natural scientists focused on the interlocking crises of capitalism, colonialism, and climate chaos. We hope, ultimately, to be able to think towards alternatives to models of analysis and practice that have rendered scholarship and art irrelevant to our times, and to modes of life leading to the destruction of our planet.
About
Project Director: Mana Kia
Working Group Members: David Lurie (EALAC), Alison Vacca (MESAAS), John Phan (EALAC), Ali Karjoo-Ravary (History), Jonathan Peterson (MESAAS), Amir Izadpanahi (MESAAS)
Alternative Modes of Being unites scholars across disciplines focusing on Asia and Africa who seek to bring premodern knowledge traditions, epistemologically decolonized, into dialogue with social and natural scientists focused on the interlocking crises of capitalism, colonialism, and climate chaos. Decolonialization did not, and cannot, end with political independence. It requires a conceptual regeneration. This project pursues such regeneration by reconnecting with earlier modes of knowledge to critically reengage lost ideas that can potentially contribute to current issues. Temporal, disciplinary, and institutional divides often stymie rich debates of scholars engaged in analysis of the present from trickling into the purview of premodernists. By the same token, scholars engaged with the present rarely engage in any systematic way with the premodern worlds. Ultimately, we cannot fully rethink substance, however, without also rethinking academic form, why it is essential that artists, photographers, and creative writers join the conversation. Our three main themes are around questions of 1) Growth and Prosperity, 2) Self and Social World, and 3) Beauty and Ethics.
Creative Resistances: Arts and Activism in the Americas
We bring together scholars, activists, and artists from across the Americas to explore modes of creative resistance. We aim to analyze how art and activism intersect, considering the diverse contexts of Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. We investigate how artistic interventions are utilized to imagine alternative futures amidst the rise of far-right governments and repressive political regimes. Our inquiry seeks to understand the continuity and divergence of creative tactics in political resistance, comparing contemporary approaches with historical precedents.
Project Co-Directors:
María José Contreras (Associate Professor, School of the Arts, Theatre, Columbia University)
Jacqueline García Suárez (Assistant Professor, Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures,
Columbia University)
Working Group Members:
Maja Horn (Associate Professor of Spanish & Latin American Cultures, Barnard College)
Graciela Montaldo (Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University)
Kay Kemp (PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies, Columbia University)
Creative Resistances: Arts and Activisms in the Americas convene a group of scholars, activists and artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada interested in studying, practicing and rehearsing modes of creative resistance. We propose to look at the entanglement of arts and activisms from a hemispheric perspective that considers regions of the Americas in their diversity and specificity but also in relation to one another. We will engage with artistic interventions employed as means to experiment with alternative modes of conviviality that serve to the collective reimagination of otherwise futures. We aim to examine how the entanglement of arts and activisms serves as a response to the ascent of far-right, ultra-conservative governments in the Americas, as well as to the repressive political realities of leftist states such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Focused in recent cases and experiences, we are interested in thinking and experimenting with the continuities and ruptures with previous uses of creative tools in political resistance in the Americas, asking in what ways the current use of artistic tactics is similar and different from the historical deployment of aesthetic gestures to mobilize political action?
The working group methodology will resist the distinction of practice-based research, arts practice and scholarship by facilitating diverse modes of engagement such as discussions, gatherings and workshops. The group will also challenge disciplinary geopolitics by embracing a fluid interdisciplinary approach that puts in conversation the fields of Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Decolonial Theory, U.S. Latinx Studies, Indigenous studies, performance studies, visual culture studies, among others.
Seeds of Diaspora
‘Seeds of Diaspora’ will convene an interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners. Together, we will select a short list (5-8) of non-cultivated plants found in New York City, and consider how they each embody native and non-native landscape imaginaries.
Project Co-Directors: Lynnette Widder & Ralph Ghoche
Project Coordinator: Fern Thompsett
‘Seeds of Diaspora’ will convene an interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners. Together, we will select a short list (5-8) of non-cultivated plants found in New York City, and consider how they each embody native and non-native landscape imaginaries. We will link each plant and its botanical descriptors to maps, images, practices, and texts that communicate ecological, herbalist, culinary, agricultural, literary, artistic, anthropological, and other cultural traditions. In an era of fraught nationalism, mass migrations and climate change, as the boundaries between ecosystems and society are constantly reconfigured, we will emphasize the potential of plants to connect and to describe cultural landscapes past, present, and future.
Past Events
News
Image credit: Lynnette Widder
Fellows
Refugee Cities: Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement
We are a group of scholars from across disciplines and institutions interested in bringing together the increasingly interrelated fields of Refugee Studies and Urban Studies. While there are few scholars or institutions that explicitly and intentionally consider these fields together, the expanding number of internationally displaced people settling in cities and interacting with and in urban spaces across the globe merits sustained engagement and analysis.
Project Co-Directors: Amy Chazkel and Bahia Munem
Project Coordinator: Daniela Perleche Ugás
Working Group Members: Mae M. Ngai, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Hiba Bou Akar, Giorgia Mirto, Achilles Kallergis, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, A. George Bajalia, Alex Aleinikoff, Amin Younes Aoussar, Emma Shaw Crane, Matthew DeMaio, Nadia Latif, Fanny Julissa García, Neni Panourgiá, Faime Alpagu, Lisa Jahn and Kian Tajbakhsh
US State Department photograph, aerial view of the Za’atri Refugee Camp, Jordan (July 18, 2013) (public domain, accessed on Flickr.
We are a group of scholars from across disciplines and institutions interested in bringing together the increasingly interrelated fields of Refugee Studies and Urban Studies. While there are few scholars or institutions that explicitly and intentionally consider these fields together, the expanding number of internationally displaced people settling in cities and interacting with and in urban spaces across the globe merits sustained engagement and analysis. In this CSSD working group, our discussions and public programming will center the social, political, and material interrelatedness of refugees and cities in varying geographical areas. The group’s core members include researchers and educators who have come together to collaborate on various projects at the intersection of urban and refugee studies, including public
symposia, and to engage in mutually enriching discussions and forge lasting intellectual and professional ties.
Cities are generally conceptualized as permanent (made of brick, mortar, and metal), modern, and planned. They are governed by nation-states and are part of complex networks of global capital and knowledge. In contrast, the spaces where refugees settle (or are settled) are generally considered temporary. However, this does not match the actual experience of refugees, since many come from and inhabit cities. Indeed, refugee communities have become involved in urban housing movements in places like São Paulo, a city with a long history of urban occupations and informal settlements. Beginning in the aughts, “urban refugee” surfaced as a category of concern in policy (UNHCR 2009; 2012) and humanitarian discourses but remains under-explored in scholarly research, especially since the majority of the world’s refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) live in cities. Conversely, refugees displaced by persecution, violence, and war(s) often spend open-ended periods in sprawling settlements that are functionally urban places and actively take part in place-making processes generally associated with permanent municipalities. Domiz camp in northern Iraq (refugee republic) is a good example. It was initially designated as a temporary space to host Syrian refugees fleeing civil war and has become an increasingly permanent and elaborate urban space (see also Burj el-Barajneh in Beirut). A central aim of this interdisciplinary working group is to reflect collectively and critically about the different analytical levels at which to examine the lives of internationally displaced people and communities, who, while often stateless, are inhabitants of “city-states,” nation-states, and other complex, overlapping jurisdictions. We address such pressing issues of humanistic (and humanitarian) concern in the status and deep history of sanctuary cities, the extent of and limitations to national sovereignty, and struggles for the right to the city.
We are interested in examining these urban sites as spaces of reception, rejection, hypervisibility, and invisibility. The manner in which refugees manage and are managed in these sites are also often structured by social relations (community, labor, family, gender) and formal and informal economies. Moreover, a cursory look at the response in cities to provide refuge and shelter to Afghan refugees in late summer 2021 (or Syrian refugees in 2015) versus the response to Ukrainian refugees in the current crisis (and the distinction in treatment at border crossings toward white Ukrainians and African and South Asian students that had been in the country) recenters the racial hierarchies in these processes. As a group that includes scholars whose research has investigated cities both past and present, we are interested in thinking about the ways in which internationally displaced people settle in cities as part of a long history of the improvised, often dissident use of urban space, and the historical construction of social inequality across different geographic scales.
Past Events
News
Extractive Media: Infrastructures & Aesthetics of Depletion
Questions of resource extraction are now front and center in almost every academic discipline across the humanities and social sciences. Propelled by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, scholars are reinventing their core research questions to ask how we came to this pass, and also where do we go from here? The Extractive Media working group seeks to take this conversation beyond fossil fuels to track the ways in which energy economies span continents and oceans, differentially affect unequal bodies and lives, and bleed across disparate sites such as the coal mine and the computer screen.
Project Co-Directors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander and Debashree Mukherjee
Project Coordinator: Hannah Rachel Pivo
A "Hindu laborer" gathers sap from a rubber tree on a plantation in Fiji. Stereograph card published by Keystone View Company, NY, c. 1880.
Questions of resource extraction are now front and center in almost every academic discipline across the humanities and social sciences. Propelled by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, scholars are reinventing their core research questions to ask how we came to this pass, and also where do we go from here? The Extractive Media working group seeks to take this conversation beyond fossil fuels to track the ways in which energy economies span continents and oceans, differentially affect unequal bodies and lives, and bleed across disparate sites such as the coal mine and the computer screen. We begin with the question of how media forms (print, architecture, photography, cinema, or, more recently, computational media) have historically contributed to material and imaginative modes of extraction, and, further, how we might turn to these very forms to find new possibilities for equitable futures?
Readings
Publications
See below a list of recent publications by working group members:
Debashree Mukherjee (2022). Energy and Exhaustion in a Coal Melodrama: Kaala Patthar (1979), in Ecocinema: Theory & Practice II, Eds. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt. Routledge, pp. 52-69.
Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Nineteenth-Century Alchemy: Mineral Statistics circa 1850,” Perspecta 55 (Spring 2023), pp. 30-43.
Past Events
Fellows
News
Recovery
In accordance with the CSSD’s designated focus on Imagining Justice, our working group critically considers the circulations of “recovery” in arenas such as biomedicine, pandemic politics, climate change, economics, and other fields of governance. Aligned with current scholarly and activist efforts to think through the transformations in social relations required for meaningful versions of repair and recuperation, we are particularly interested in challenging presumptions of the feasibility/desirability of a return to a prior normative state. Instead, we aim to consider how a transformative justice approach might spur new imaginations of not only social justice but also embodiment, health, individual well-being and collective dis-ease.
Project Co-Directors: Elizabeth Bernstein and Rebecca Jordan-Young
Project Coordinator: Chloé Samala Faux
Working Group Members: Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Kerwin Kaye, Salma Ismaiel, Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr., Marisa Solomon, Miriam Ticktin, Jackie Orr, Amy Zhou
Credit: used with permission from account owners of @healthcareforthepeople2020 on Instagram.
What histories have given rise to the concept of “recovery,” and explain the apparent fungibility of this concept across such broad domains of social life? In accordance with the CSSD’s designated focus on Imagining Justice, our working group critically considers the circulations of “recovery” in arenas such as biomedicine, pandemic politics, climate change, economics, and other fields of governance. Aligned with current scholarly and activist efforts to think through the transformations in social relations required for meaningful versions of repair and recuperation, we are particularly interested in challenging presumptions of the feasibility/desirability of a return to a prior normative state. Instead, we aim to consider how a transformative justice approach might spur new imaginations of not only social justice but also embodiment, health, individual well-being and collective dis-ease. Because the grounding metaphors for “recovery” in social and political life derive from biomedical discourse, and because technoscientific solutions are often deemed to be integral to modes of recuperation, our proposed method for addressing these questions is F/ISTS (feminist intersectional science and technology studies). Exploring notions of "recovery" through the dual lenses of transformative justice and feminist/intersectional STS, we will pay close attention to the reciprocal relations between techno-scientific practices and knowledges, on the one hand, and multiple intersecting axes of power on the other.
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Prison Education and Social Justice
This project brings together faculty and graduate students with alums of Columbia’s prison education programs to think together about how to strengthen the courses and other educational opportunities Columbia presently offers to incarcerated students; to develop new courses and faculty training supports for those initiatives; and to think about and develop a more systematic set of classes to be offered to Columbia and Barnard undergraduates dealing with social justice and its relationship to carceral systems.
Project Director: Jean Howard
Graduate Assistant: Patrick Anson
The aim of this project is to bring together Barnard and Columbia faculty and graduate students with alums of Columbia’s prison education programs to think together about how to strengthen the courses and other educational opportunities Columbia presently offers to incarcerated students; to develop new courses and faculty training supports for those initiatives; and to think about and develop a more systematic set of classes to be offered to Columbia and Barnard undergraduates dealing with social justice and its relationship to carceral systems.
News
Past Events
Fellows
Black Atlantic Ecologies
The Black Atlantic Ecologies group supports and elaborates scholarship that centers the enduring effects of coloniality and the dynamic power of protest in African diasporic confrontations with environmental crisis. This group poses a single central question: How might Black Atlantic experience with peril, with perishment and with premature death offer a rubric for thinking futurity, including reproductive futurity, in a moment of environmental collapse?
Project Co-Directors: Vanessa Agard-Jones, Marisa Solomon
Project Coordinator: Chazelle Rhoden
The waters are rising. The earth is warming. Species are perishing. The world is ending.
Apocalyptic pronouncements about the refiguring of the Earth are everywhere around us. Now commonplace, predictions and pronouncements about the era that geologists have called the Anthropocene remind us that we are at the end of the world as we know it, and that global warming, rising sea levels, the acidification of the oceans, crisis-rates of species extinction and ever-escalating social disasters masked as natural ones are but some of the more visible markers of the imperilment of this planet. Though they have pretensions to inclusion, many of these emergent narratives mobilize ideas about the human, the animal and the environment that universalize rather than particularize, occluding the fact that these categorizations have long been shot through with histories of normative violence.
The Black Atlantic Ecologies group supports and elaborates scholarship that centers the enduring effects of coloniality and the dynamic power of protest in African diasporic confrontations with environmental crisis. Taking as our provocation the refiguring of human and nonhuman ecologies occasioned by the transatlantic slave trade, we seek to understand what Nadia Ellis has called, riffing on José Muñoz, “the queer work of raced survival” as we come to grips with contemporary dimensions of anthropogenic climate change. As inspiration for the work that we undertake together, we ask after visions for survival and justice that are grounded in Black queer, Black feminist, and antiracist responses to the subjugation of the earth as well as of our human and nonhuman cotravelers. And given the crossing of linguistic and imperial zones that the transatlantic slave trade occasioned, we pay particular attention to the divergences and synergies among anglophone, francophone, hispanophone, and lusophone analyses of our predicament as we articulate our conditions as well as the political possibilities on our horizons. This group poses a single central question: How might Black Atlantic experience with peril, with perishment and with premature death offer a rubric for thinking futurity, including reproductive futurity, in a moment of environmental collapse?
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Photo by Alyssa A.L. James, Coast of St. Lucia, 2016
The Black Atlantic Ecologies working group is funded by the
Earth Institute.
Fellows
Migrant Personhood and Rights: Crises of Recognition
This working group will explore the long-standing global crisis of recognition at the heart of anti-immigrant ideas and policies. It will focus on the discourses, practices, and institutions that actively deny immigrants recognition, as well as those discourses, practices, and institutions that recognize, support, and affirm migrants and their rights. They will engage with these issues in the areas of civics and education, immigration law and policy, and the characterization and treatment of migrants and refugees.
Project Co-Directors: Thea Abu El-Haj, JC Salyer
Project Coordinator: Yasmin Naji
How does a nation-state reach the point where it becomes national policy to remove thousands of children from their parents as a deterrent to seeking asylum? How does a nation-state reach the point where it prosecutes individuals for providing water to migrants in a desert? How does a nation-state reach the point that it bans people from entering the country based on their religion?
During his first week in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order that banned foreign nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. In response, there were spontaneous protests around the country and broad condemnation of the sweeping anti-immigrant nature of the policies. This pattern repeated in the succeeding months, as the executive branch continued to focus on anti-immigrant initiatives, such as family separation on the border and policies limiting receipt of public benefits by immigrants. Despite this, large segments of the public remain favorable to immigrants and immigration and perennial conflicts over immigration policy have increased, even resulting is a 35-day shutdown of the federal government.
Our project addresses anti-immigrant sentiments and policies by engaging both academic research and the expertise of community-based migrant advocacy organizations to develop novel questions and approaches that address current immigration issues. The project will culminate with a series of public interventions that allow academics, activists, artists, and advocates to communicate and cooperate in imagining justice and recognition for migrants.
News
Image by the Undocumented Migration Project.
Past Events
Fellows
Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean
In response to the increasing power of the evangelical right in Latin America and the Caribbean, this project traces renewed interest in traditional and indigenous belief systems that have fueled struggles for environmental justice. These struggles rely on expressive and aesthetic forms such as ritual, song, and performance. These forms, in turn, give shape to new modes of imagining environmental justice. This comparative project is undertaken by a working group of scholars, artists and activists from Columbia University in collaboration with colleagues from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Project Co-Directors: Ana Ochoa, Ron Gregg
Project Coordinator: Julia Delgadillo
Struggles around environmental conflicts have increased dramatically in Latin America and the Caribbean over the past few decades, affecting and displacing indigenous populations, Afro-descendants, women, children, and peasants. Communities have to confront the transnational increase of agribusiness, hydroelectric projects,
mining corporations, systematic food injustice, and their entanglement with the drug war and localized armed conflicts. Such struggles are taking place amidst dramatic events provoked by climate change as well as the rise of extremist governments in the Americas, supported by the evangelical right, increasing the number of climate, alimentary, and war refugees and asylum-seekers.
The presence of evangelical missions among indigenous peoples, especially among recently contacted groups in need of assistance, is pervasive in the Amazon, in Colombia, and in Puerto Rico, and has augmented exponentially during the last decades. In reaction to persistent attempts at conversion by native and foreign missionaries, a new shamanistic movement and alliance has taken shape in several regions of Northwestern Amazonia, in Colombia, Peru and Brazil, and new transnational configurations of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian religions have emerged. A potent cosmopolitical alliance is taking shape, one whose ritual efficacy consists in
the creation of new shared artistic forms.
Our group proposes to study current struggles for justice that are articulated through the expressive cultures and aesthetic experiences of local communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. The resurgence and mobilization of what have historically been called traditional, indigenous, and Afro-descendant expressive forms-- songs, rituals, images, objects, feasts, culinary arts, and ceremonies -- has been dramatic. Since the mid-1980s, we have also seen the rise of an indigenous film movement in different countries in Latin America. Technologies such as loudspeakers, microphones, hard drives, and other media are changing public and private space. New alliances between artists, scholars, and ritual specialists like shamans or babalaos (e.g. in Colombia, Cuba and Brazil), and between sound artists and activists (e.g. in Puerto Rico and Cuba) are informing these aesthetic expressions. Our working group contends that these forms of aesthetic experience – in narrative form, through visual images, through sounds, through unexpected alliances –give shape to new ways of imagining justice and of imagining the relation between humans and non-humans, including deities and other religious entities.
News
Image: Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace
For more from the Environmental Justice working group listen to Latin America @ Columbia, a podcast hosted by working group co-director Professor Vicky Murillo, discussing major themes around Latin American history, culture, and politics.
The Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean working group is funded by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.
Past Events
Affiliated Faculty
Data Algorithms and Social Justice
The “Data, Algorithms, and Social Justice” working group catalyzes interdisciplinary dialogues and research into urgent contemporary issues around artificial intelligence, automated decision-making, power, and social change. In the twenty-first century, conceptions of social difference are shifting rapidly in response to the increasing influence of algorithms and automated decision-making processes, with profound impacts on employment, medical care, criminal justice, government services, and more. To effectively intervene in the injustices posed by our data-driven world will require new approaches and analytical tools, combining the critical lenses of the humanities with the skills of data scientists, programmers, statisticians, and more.
Project Directors: Matthew Jones, Laura Kurgan, Dennis Tenen, Chris Wiggins
Graduate Director: Nikita Shepard
The “Data, Algorithms, and Social Justice” working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference catalyzes interdisciplinary dialogues and research into urgent contemporary issues around artificial intelligence, automated decision-making, power, and social change.
In the twenty-first century, conceptions of social difference are shifting rapidly in response to the increasing influence of algorithms and automated decision-making processes, with profound impacts on employment, medical care, criminal justice, government services, and more. Emerging techniques of data gathering and analysis not only impact the treatment of pre-existing social groups or demographic categories, but also create new vectors of difference along lines that do not neatly correspond to pre-digital collectivities. To effectively intervene in the injustices posed by our data-driven world will require new approaches and analytical tools, combining the critical lenses of the humanities with the skills of data scientists, programmers, statisticians, and more.
The Data, Algorithms, and Social Justice working group brings together scholars working in a variety of disciplines at Columbia and beyond to engage these critical questions, through these core activities:
Building an interdisciplinary cohort of graduate students from different departments concerned with data and justice, through shared intellectual engagement, social events, and networking;
Presenting public events on Columbia’s (virtual) campus, including lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, and participatory technology events
Hosting a workshop series for graduate students and early career faculty from a range of disciplines to present ongoing research and works in progress before an interdisciplinary audience
Appointing graduate fellows each year to support innovative research into data, algorithms, and social justice across disciplines
Building towards organizing a conference that will bring together leading scholars, students, researchers, activists, and community stakeholders for critical conversations on how data, algorithms, and machine learning processes impact social difference and justice.
Past Events
Pedagogies of Dignity
Pedagogies of Dignity (2018-19) was an interdisciplinary initiative that brought together formerly incarcerated people, activists, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Project Directors: Christia Mercer
Graduate Assistant: Olivia Leigh Branscum
Pedagogies of Dignity was an interdisciplinary initiative that brought together formerly incarcerated people, activists, faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from the Humanities and Social Sciences.
This project had a theoretical and practical component. The theoretical component explored the philosophical and political importance of human dignity. In current debates about criminal justice reform, institutionalized racism, systemic economic injustice, and related issues, the notion of human dignity has emerged as key. The practical component of our project involved the development of a pedagogy of dignity. The formerly incarcerated members of our group worked with those who have taught in prison to create best-practice standards for such teaching. Our practical work informed – and was informed by – our theoretical conversations.
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Racial Capitalism
Since its first usage by antiapartheid activists in South Africa to its elaboration by political theorist, Cedric J. Robinson, racial capitalism is a concept that delineates the interlinked relationships of race and class constitute of global capitalism. The racial capitalism working group is a site of sustained collaborative research and study. Our collective work is rooted in a commitment to Black radicalism, historical materialism, feminism, and anti-imperialism.
Project Directors: Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, and Manu Karuka
Graduate Assistant: Hannah Pullen-Blasnik
Media Fellow: Larry Madowo (2020)
Since its first usage by antiapartheid activists in South Africa to its elaboration by political theorist Cedric J. Robinson, racial capitalism is a concept that delineates the interlinked relationships of race and class constitutive of global capitalism. The racial capitalism working group is a site of sustained collaborative research and study. Our collective work is rooted in a commitment to Black radicalism, historical materialism, feminism, and anti-imperialism.
The working group, directed by Jordan T. Camp, Term Assistant Professor of American Studies, Barnard College; Christina Heatherton, Assistant Professor of American Studies, Barnard College; and Manu Vimalassery, Assistant Professor of American Studies, Barnard College, theorizes the connections between exploitation and expropriation in interlinked political geographies. The “Racial Capitalism” working group will build on and also expand already existing efforts of the Barnard New Directions in American Studies (NDAS) initiative.
With members that include scholars from Barnard, Columbia, and the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (CPCP) at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as local scholars, graduate students, organizers, and visiting international scholars, this group seeks to ask: what visions of justice does the critique of political economy enable us to imagine, and to achieve? Through public lectures, seminars, manuscript workshops, conferences, community-based research projects, publications, exhibitions, and a digital archive, the working group seeks to gain clarity on the material and ideological links between Indigenous dispossession, racism, imperialism, and capitalist political economy.
News
Elizabeth Catlett, "Watts: Detroit: Washington: Harlem: Newark" (1970)
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Publications
Queer Aqui
Queer Aqui is a CSSD working group to discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame. This group builds upon a vast network of queer scholars worldwide to consider how best to resituate queer studies to respond to shifts in the meanings of family, sexual health, gendered embodiment, religion, sexual practices, gender variance, activism and sexual communities.
formerly Queer Theory: Here, Now, and Everywhere
Project Co-Directors: Jack Halberstam, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Daniel Da Silva
Project Coordinator: Levi C. R. Hord
Queer Aqui is a CSSD working group to discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame. This group builds upon the vast network of queer scholars here in the New York area and reaches out to groups in Beirut, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro, Quito and Istanbul in order to consider how best to resituate queer studies to respond to shifts in the meanings of family, sexual health, gendered embodiment, religion, sexual practices, gender variance, activism and sexual communities worldwide. This group’s main focus is in considering the place of sexuality and gender in both the spread of global capitalism and right-wing populism and in the activist responses to these new forms of authoritarianism.
Scholars in this group have worked on neoliberalism, LGBT law, trans* issues, transnational imaginaries, queer diaspora, negative affects, art and politics, the queer decolonial, temporality and spatiality, phenomenology and much more. This is a multidisciplinary group with many transnational contacts and contexts that is committed to asking questions about the future of queer politics, the future of queer culture and the potential of new forms of solidarity, protest and queer thought.
News
Publications
"Facial Weaponization Suite: Fag Face Mask” by Zach Blas, 2012, photo by Christopher O’Leary.
Past Events
Fellows
Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics
Applying lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and inequality to the current analyses of climate change in the Pacific Region, Pacific Climate Circuits (2015-18) sought to reframe the conversation about climate change and Pacific Islanders.
Project Directors: Paige West, Kevin Fellezs, J.C. Salyer
Pacific Climate Circuits applied lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and inequality to the current analyses of climate change in the Pacific Region. The working group, directed by Paige West, Department Chair and Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College; Kevin Fellezs, Assistant Professor of Music and African American Studies, Columbia University; and J.C. Salyer, Term Assistant Professor of Practice, Sociology, Barnard College, examined the specific political-economic systems culpable for climate change in the region, linking them to its histories of colonialism and neoliberalism. Researchers sought solutions outside the typical hard sciences approach, instead drawing on scholarship in the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences to scrutinize the region, its environment, and its people.
News
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Publications
Bandung Humanisms
This interdisciplinary research project, Bandung Humanisms (2015-18), examined the workings of the progressive political, social, and cultural movement among nations of the Global South that refused to ally with either major power bloc during the cold war.
Project Directors: Stathis Gourgouris, Lydia Liu
Bandung Humanisms was an interdisciplinary research project examining the workings of Bandung Humanisms, the progressive political, social, and cultural movement among nations of the Global South that refused to ally with either major power bloc during the Cold War. The working group, a collaboration between scholars at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles uncoverd the post-colonial developing world’s espousal of a radical brand of humanism and self-determination that gave rise to the Non-Aligned Movement of non-aggressor states. The working group traced the institutions, associations, writings, and artworks identified with the Bandung Humanisms movement, connecting them to current global struggles for social justice.
The diverse group of scholars included Stathis Gourgouris, Professor, Classics, Columbia University; Aamir Mufti, Professor, Comparative Literature, UCLA; and Lydia Liu, Director, Institute of Comparative Literature & Society and Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities, Department of East Asian Languages, Columbia University.
News
Past Events
Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy
Unpayable Debt (2016-19) was a comparative research and public engagement project about the emergence and impact of massive debt on vulnerable polities and populations.
Project Directors: Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Sarah Muir
Graduate Assistant: Laura Charney
Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy raised critical questions about the role of debt in contemporary capitalism; the relationship between debt, migration, and violence; and the emergence of new political and cultural identities, particularly among subordinated groups. The project's members, which included scholars, filmmakers, and journalists, examined the politics of information asymmetry—a lack of data and conceptual tools—and how this might undermine social mobilization in impoverished communities, peoples, and countries.
The interdisciplinary group compared recent and landmark cases such as Puerto Rico, Argentina, Greece, Spain, and U.S. cities like Detroit as well as other spaces that have been historically affected by debt. The project also developed a web platform to disseminate existing information, facilitate public engagement, and increase discussion about the politics of debt.
The project’s directors were Sarah Muir, Term Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University and Frances Negrón Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University.
See the press release for the working group's digital PRSyllabus explaining the Puerto Rican debt crisis.
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Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture
Precision Medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person. Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture (2016-19) examines the ethical, legal, and political implications of precision medicine research.
Project Directors: Rachel Adams, Gil Eyal, Maya Sabatello
Graduate Assistant: Daniel Wojtkiewicz
Precision medicine—an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person—raises a myriad of cultural, political, and historical questions that the humanities and social sciences are uniquely positions to address. The PMEPC lecture series represents a broad-based exploration of questions that precision medicine raises in law, ethics, the social sciences, economics, and the humanities.
The Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture Project is co-directed by Rachel Adams, PhD, Professor of English; and Maya Sabatello, LLB, PhD, Assistant Professor of Clinical Bioethics. The PMEPC is co-sponsored by Columbia Precision Medicine & Society and the CSSD.
PMEPC events are free and open to the public. For more information on this project, please visit socialdifference.columbia.edu or email Daniel Wojtkiewicz at dnw2116@columbia.edu
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The Digital Black Atlantic
The Digital Black Atlantic Project (2013-16) was a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary working group that came together to invent a scholarly resource and digital platform for multimedia explorations and documentations of literary texts, visual documents, sites, moments, rituals and ceremonies, monuments and memorials, performances, and material objects emerging out of and concerning the Black Atlantic world.
Project Directors: Kaiama L. Glover, David Scott
The Digital Black Atlantic Project (DBAP) was a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary working group that came together to invent a scholarly resource and digital platform for multimedia explorations and documentations of literary texts, visual documents, sites, moments, rituals and ceremonies, monuments and memorials, performances, and material objects emerging out of and concerning the Black Atlantic world. From the epic prose-poems of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott, to the city of New Orleans as Atlantic capital, to the explosive moment of historical convergence that was the year 1968, the rhizomatic literary, performative, historical, geographical and other paradigms of the Black Atlantic demand to be approached from as many informed disciplinary perspectives as possible. DBAP sought to place these and other perspectives in immediate and sustained dialogue with one another, building "deep texts" -- experiences of carefully curated content that allow for enriched engagements with regional cultural productions. Initial work focused on the Caribbean and its diaspora, analyzing the intersection of information technologies with fields such as American studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, black studies, ethnomusicology, and communications, among others.
