Working Groups

At CSSD, we fund up to two working groups annually that are led by Columbia and Barnard faculty to engage in inquiry around inequality and its public dissemination.

The Center currently has five working groups under the following themes.

Imagining Social Justice

brings together scholars, activists, and artists to envision new ways of fighting inequality and promoting gender, racial, and environmental justice in global and domestic contexts.

Crisis

probes and historicizes the myriad crises unfolding in the present, how crisis has become a seemingly everyday condition, and the ways in which crises experiences and impacts fracture along racial, class, and gender lines.

Women Creating Change

engages distinguished feminist scholars from diverse fields who focus on contemporary global problems affecting women and how women address these problems.

Active Groups

Featured

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.