University and Crisis
We explore and go beyond the current crisis faced by universities today. Rather than approaching this moment as an aberration, the group aims to contextualize it within longer histories of the university and its entanglement with wider socioeconomic and political structures and inequalities.
About
Project Directors: C. Riley Snorton, Columbia University; Anupama Rao, Barnard College
The Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia University, the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study (Gordon Institute) at Teachers College are partnering on an interdisciplinary, faculty-led research working group on the university and crisis. Conceived in response to recent developments at Columbia University and Barnard College and in line with CSSD’s new thematic focus on crisis, the working group is engaged in a year-long series of reading meetings and public programs to explore the state of the university today and how we got here.
Rather than approaching the current crisis moment as an aberration, the group aims to contextualize it within longer histories of the university and its entanglement with wider socioeconomic and political structures. Focused on four conceptual figures and sites, “the archive,” “the experiment,” “the student,” and “the lexicon,” the group engages with critical university studies scholarship to think through universities’ entanglements with colonialism, slavery, and their afterlives; the role of the university in reproducing socio-economic inequalities; the precaritization of academic labor and its impact on academic freedom; the securitization of campuses; financialization, performance metrics, and branding for the neoliberal university; affirmative action, diversity, and the tokenization of difference/administrative co-opting of ethnic and gender studies; and universities as real estate developers with massive displacement effects.
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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.
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.
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Image credit: Lynnette Widder