Reframing Gendered Violence
Project Directors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Kaiama Glover, Jennifer Hirsch, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Anupama Rao, Kendall Thomas, Paige West
Reframing Gendered Violence opened up a critical global conversation among scholars and practitioners that recasts the problem of violence against women as it is currently discussed in a wide range of fields, both academic and policy-oriented, including human rights, public health, journalism, law, feminist studies, literature, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, and history.
Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) have come to prominence as loci for activism throughout the world. Both VAW and GBV regularly garner international media attention and occupy a growing place in international law and global governance. Since 2000 alone there have been more than 25 UN protocols, instruments and conventions directed at its eradication or mitigation.
The working group engaged critically with the terms, the assumptions, and the policies that have underwritten this unprecedented outpouring of attention. What do different parties mean when they talk of violence against women or of gender-based violence? Is the main form of violence against women sexual in nature? Does it occur primarily in domestic settings? What is left out when the problem is framed in this way, and whose interests are served by such a framing? When invoked in the halls of the United Nations and used to shape international policy, the terms violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) are often assumed to have stable meanings, yet they do not.
CSSD, in collaboration with scholars, artists and activists located in the regions where Columbia has established Global Centers, examined in the most capacious way what constitutes gendered violence. The goal was to move the conversation on this crucial topic in new directions, pointing to elisions and exclusions in many common-sense understandings of these terms; deepening the ways in which we engage with the manifestations and causes of such violence; unpacking the politics through which accusations of GBV can sometimes be used to pathologize entire communities, societies or religious traditions, or to divert attention from more systemic forms of abuse such as economic, discursive, and political violence.
News
The article, “Why it’s still so hard not to drink,” discusses alcohol, power dynamics, and privilege.
Columbia Law Professor Franke commented on new US legislation to combat anti-Asian hate crimes.
In “Empirical Ephemera,” Professor Agard-Jones used the concept-metaphor of sand to consider how coloniality is made material.
Congratulations to Professors Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Mabel O. Wilson on joining the Academy.
Join us Monday, April 5th for a talk moderated by Professor Lila Abu-Lughod with Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan, author of Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence.
Professor Lila Abu-Lughod will be featured in a virtual project discussing her new book for the Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence working group.
Engendering the Archive Working Group Fellow spoke to the Post about the Capitol riots and racial injustice in the police responses to protesting.
Past Events
Please join us in celebrating the recent publication of Gender, Governance and Islam, with an introduction by Lila Abu-Lughod.
The pop-up exhibition “Arts of Intervention” brings together an international group of artists connected to the working group on “Women Mobilizing Memory” of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference in the context of the Third Annual Memory Studies Association Conference in Madrid, June, 2019.
In recognition of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, CSSD working group Reframing Gendered Violence co-sponsors an interactive panel exploring lessons learned from the past 40 years in the field of sexual violence, examine the current landscape, and identify key strategies for the future.
CSSD working group Reframing Gendered Violence co-sponsors DOCUMENTARY STORYTELLING AND COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES: A conversation with photographers Nina Berman, An Autobiography of Miss Wish, and Susan Meiselas, A Room of Their Own.
The Reframing Gendered Violence project at CSSD presents a panel discussion with Fiona Hukula (PNG National Research Institute), Mary Fairio (PNG National Research Institute), and Melissa Demian (University of St. Andrews).
Publications
