Social Difference Columbia University 5/6/24 Social Difference Columbia University 5/6/24

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.

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.

Social Difference Columbia University 5/6/24 Social Difference Columbia University 5/6/24

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.

Social Difference Columbia University 8/14/23 Social Difference Columbia University 8/14/23

Seeds of Diaspora

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.