Afro-Nordic Feminisms’ Successful Intervention at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies Annual Meeting in Seattle
Members of the Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working group participated in a panel at the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS) Conference in Seattle, held this year May 9-12, 2024.
Seattle recently hosted the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS) annual meeting, where the Afro-Nordic Feminisms Working Group, with members from both the US and Scandinavia, gathered to engage in critical discussions on race, racialization, and Blackness in the Nordic countries. This meeting was notably supported by CSSD, for which Working Group members are deeply grateful.
The Working Group’s primary goal was to bring attention to issues often overlooked in these discursive spaces. This year's SASS coincided with the National Nordic Museum's exhibition "Nordic Utopia? African American Artists in the 20th Century." Our panel followed a discussion on the exhibition, sparking a meaningful conversation about the history and contemporary cultures of Blackness in the Nordics.
Additionally, the Afro-Nordic Feminisms had productive dialogues with indigenous scholars focusing on race and racialization in Greenland and Sápmi. These exchanges were invaluable in broadening the scope of the group’s discussions.
Looking ahead, a number of group members will attend a conference in Iceland in October, funded by the University of Iceland, to continue these very important conversations.
Overall, the meeting in Seattle was a significant success, advancing the collective understanding of members of the project and fostering deeper connections within the community.
Prepared by Monica Miller
Edited by Evan Berk
Transforming Prison Education from the Inside: How a Columbia Initiative is Impacting Change
In spring of 2023 CSSD Graduate Administrative Fellow Tomoki Fukui interviewed Professor Jean Howard, Director of the Prison Education and Social Justice Working Group, and Patrick Anson, Graduate Assistant for the project. This piece is based on that interview and updated to include events undertaken this year.
Over the past three years the Prison Education and Social Justice Working Group at CSSD has worked to prepare students and faculty to teach inside prison and so to expand educational opportunities for incarcerated men and women.
Teaching inside prison presents unique challenges and opportunities. The group has worked to understand this site of work and to prepare classes that will engage and benefit students who attain their degrees by persistence and resilience.
Those who teach inside, the group discovered, will have their materials scrutinized by Department of Corrections officers before they are cleared to be taught; they themselves will undergo background checks and fingerprinting as a condition of work; and they will need to show unfailing politeness to the prison personnel who screen them when they arrive to teach and monitor the movements and actions of both students and faculty inside the facility.
Part of the Working Group’s task, therefore, was simply to understand how to successfully navigate the prison environment as an instructor at a very particular site of work. The group was aided in this task by speaking regularly with those at Columbia’s Center for Justice, like Claudia Rincón, who coordinate instruction inside affiliated prisons. The group also spoke with instructors who have taught inside and so learned from their experience, and it greatly benefited by engaging regularly with formerly incarcerated students who shared with the group what they found to be the most stimulating and helpful courses and teaching strategies that they had encountered while they were part of prison education programs.
Because, for example, courses often meet at night after the students have been busy with other activities and work assignments for much of the day, it’s important to incorporate active elements into a class plan: structured debates, movement exercises, small group activities that engage everyone. The group read a number of articles that theorize the prison classroom, the kinds of learning that flourishes in that environment, and the relationship of prison education initiatives to abolitionist politics.
Because faculty by and large can’t hold office hours and class time is limited to two hours a week, with some of that time often lost to late starts and interruptions by prison officials, it is incredibly helpful to have graduate students accompany faculty into prison classes. Course assistants and faculty can, for example, divide the work of holding one-on-one conferences at the side of the room and leading discussions with the rest of the class; or they can each facilitate a small group discussion or help prepare materials each week to supplement and enliven individual classes or to find essays that will help students with research papers.
Part of the group’s work has involved conversations with the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of the Graduate School to allow a certain number of faculty to count prison teaching as part of their regular course load and to provide modest stipends for graduate students to serve as course facilitators. We are grateful for the enthusiastic support of the Deans and hope these opportunities will be expanded as needed.
In academic year 2023-24, various members of the working group have taught prison courses. Professor Jennifer Middleton, supported by graduate student Nick Ide, taught “Earth: Origin, Evolution, Processes, Future” at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the fall semester. Currently, Professor Alisa Solomon is teaching “Journalism and Public Life” at Sing Sing; Professor Samuel Kelton Roberts is teaching “Histories of Public Health in Communities of Color: The Built Environment in the 20 th Century United States” at Taconic Correctional Facility; and Professor Julie Crawford is teaching “Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Toni Morrison’s Paradise” at Taconic.
In addition, working group member Catherine Suffern, now working as Program Coordinator for the Justice-in-Education Initiative, has updated the comprehensive handbook for faculty and graduate students teaching in prison, and she and Patrick Anson organized a highly successful informational session for graduate students wishing to become course facilitators for prison classes on March 4.
The working group is in its final semester, but the intention is for its members to continue contributing to prison instruction going forward, as well as to helping students returning from prison to continue their education at Columbia or other institutions of higher education. Prison education is an established, if under-recognized, part of Columbia life. As a collectivity, the Prison Education and Social Justice working group is committed to seeing it thrive and evolve.
Edited by Professor Jean Howard, Patrick Anson, and Evan Berk.
Extraction, Waste, and Security
Hannah Pivo is a member of the Extractive Media Working Group, which considers the historical role that media has played in shaping, representing, and contributing to resource extraction. The project is supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference.
On the evening of Monday, March 4, the Extractive Media Working Group gathered to discuss work by Eleanor Johnson, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and architectural historian Jonah Rowen, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) in 2020.
Plate 1, “The Colonial House,” from Carl Bernhard Wadström, An Essay on Colonization (1794).
The conversation centered on selections from Johnson’s new book, Waste and Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press, 2023), and a working paper by Rowen, titled “‘We might have had our Lands long ago’: Construction of the Sierra Leone Colony.” Johnson’s book examines the concept of ‘waste’ in medieval poetry, contextualized within legal, theological, and other discourses, while Rowen’s paper addresses the history of construction—particularly temporary and long-term housing—with a focus on the role of architecture in establishing “security” in the colony.
The Extractive Media Working Group in conversation. Photo by author.
Extractive Media co-organizer Professor Zeynep Çelik Alexander opened the discussion by identifying themes shared by the two works, including ideas of labor, subsistence, and vacancy. Numerous additional themes arose through the course of discussion, such as scarcity, capital and fungibility, climate, temporality and the temporary, anxiety towards future, and sympathy. This was the first Extractive Media event in which two distinct works were discussed. The group found this format to be highly rewarding and worth repeating in the future.
Written by Hannah Pivo.
Interdisciplinary Insights Beyond the Binary: Redefining Menstruation Research with Trans Inclusivity in Mind
This article is based on an interview originally conducted in Spring 2023 by former CSSD Staff Member Tomoki Fukui, Ph.D., with the Menstrual Health and Gender Justice Working Group.
Late March 2023:
I have just returned from teaching, dumping the various paraphernalia from class to get ready for a chance to speak with Lauren Houghton and Susanne Prochazka, two members of the Menstrual Health and Gender Justice (MHGJ) working group. The current news cycle is filled with reports of the American right renewing its legislative efforts to erase transgender existence, in this instance through the denial of gender-affirming healthcare.
I am feeling isolation and despair.
I am excited to speak with the interdisciplinary research team that MHGJ has created about their newest project, a preliminary study of trans women’s experiences of menstruation.
Some readers may feel confused by that description. Biological essentialism, a key facet of white supremacist ideology and central to the perpetuation of violence against transgender people, implies that only people with ovaries can menstruate. But part of what is so interesting about this study is the way it demonstrates how biological essentialism actually inhibits our understanding of biology.
As Lauren and Susanne shared with me during our interview, we erase an entire spectrum of experiences from view — whether those of cisgender girls and women who do not menstruate, transgender men and non-binary people who do, or whether we misinterpret the cultural worlds in which menstruation is taking place — because we assume that a universal institution called “sex/gender” exists that makes experiences of gender the same across time and space.
When we gender things like hormones, genitalia, reproductive capacities, work, appearance, and so on, it becomes difficult to actually ask questions about how all of these material things function and interact with one another. “By being more inclusive and studying menstruation among a group that doesn’t have the bleeding part of the menstrual cycle really helps us deepen our understanding about menstruation. We’re really guided by the idea that not everyone who menstruates is a woman, and not every woman menstruates,” Lauren says.
“Our study is really just amplifying and validating the lived experience of trans women.”
Rather than assuming the expertise of scientists, the study uses rigorous interdisciplinary methods to validate and amplify knowledge already held in trans communities. Using a mix of qualitative interviews with trans women, hormonal analysis, and symptom tracking on a menstrual tracking app, it seeks to tease apart ideological assumptions that result in the “gatekeeping of the menstrual cycle and womanhood,” in Lauren’s words. “Our study is really just amplifying and validating the lived experience of trans women that they already know about in their community. It’s not that we’re discovering anything very new. The key is validation and amplification,” Suzanne says.
“All of my work has been on how science has been limited because we’ve gendered hormones.”
This study is an extremely welcome and urgent one in the context of extensive bias against considering trans women’s experiences of menstruation in scholarly literatures: Houghton and Prochazka observed that they could only find one study mentioning a trans woman’s experiences of menstruation, an article written by A.J Lowik, a non-binary researcher of trans health. The same bias is reproduced at the highest levels of public health research in the United States.
Lauren elaborates on recent work by an established research institution: “They define ‘sex’ as hormones. I don’t know where that’s validated because all of my work has been [about] how science has been limited because we’ve gendered hormones… The fact is that all these genders have all these hormones. So the fact that they’re defining sex by hormones is kind of flat-out wrong.”
Transgender studies more broadly is a marginalized field of research, and gatekeeping by cisgender researchers and medical professionals have played significant roles in its status as such. And while there have been marked improvements in recent years, there is also a need to critically evaluate its conditions of inclusion into the university: as transfeminist scholar Susan Stryker has observed, the relative absence of transfeminine scholars is striking, and Jin Haritaworn and Riley Snorton have questioned why trans inclusivity has done little to ameliorate an environment of deadly violence against Black trans women.
“Cisgender women’s health is under attack & transgender health is under attack right now. Our work that’s very inclusive is an antidote to that in a way.”
Houghton and Prochazka name interdisciplinarity as central to their ability to do justice to the complex and understudied field of menstruation research. “Cisgender women’s health is under attack and transgender health is under attack right now. Our work that’s very inclusive is an antidote to that in a way,” Lauren shares.
For her, the importance of accounting for cultural and socio-historical contexts for biological phenomena is linked to furthering science that is more ethical and rigorous: “I think biological and quantitative studies try to strip things to make them objective, but when things are very political you’re actually doing a disservice if you try to strip things of their context,” she says.
Susanne shares, “The study we’re doing is so rooted in the interdisciplinary approach of the working group. From my understanding, it’s pretty much one-of-a-kind, and I wish it was in existence in other universities—these working groups that fund and encourage studies like this.” The study grew organically out of the MHGJ working group. Through conversations and connections that emerged out of Menstruation, Gender, and Rights, a course that the working group had developed, and a conference they organized, they were able to form a well-informed research team bringing different kinds of expertise to the study of menstruation. Meeting A.J. Lowik and engaging with their research in particular was very formative.
The group hopes to create a toolkit and consulting service in the future for other researchers who want to implement mixed-methods approaches into their research. Adding to the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, university seminar on menstruation, and collaborations with the Mumbai Global Center, both the study and consulting service will be a cutting-edge contribution to interdisciplinary work in public health.
In the face of continued violence to trans communities generally and challenges to transgender rights and health in particular, the MHGJ working group's pioneering study on trans women's experiences with menstruation serves as a powerful antidote. By challenging prevailing biases and embracing inclusivity, the research not only validates the lived experiences of trans women but also demonstrates the urgent need for more interdisciplinary and inclusive approaches in scientific inquiry. As scholars and researchers navigate this complex field, the study and its future initiatives seek to pave the way for a more ethical and rigorous understanding of menstruation, transcending traditional boundaries and contributing to the advancement of critical menstruation studies.
Written by Tomoki Fukui, Ph.D.
Edited by Evan Berk
Reciprocity, Black Solidarity, and Reconnection: A Conversation on Amefricanidade and Quilombo with Professor Camila Daniel and Runnie Exuma
This is an excerpt from a July 29, 2022 interview between Columbia University student Runnie Exuma, CSSD staff member Tomoki Fukui, and Professor Camila Daniel around topics of anticolonial epistemology, Black feminist practices, quilombo, Amefricanidade, dance, and Black solidarity. It has been edited and condensed for brevity. You can view the full interview here.
Tomoki Fukui (Tommy): I was really struck by all of the examples that Runnie provided me with of your work and of the way that you're thinking about how migration and moving between different racial epistemic landscapes impacts people's bodily experiences, and the ways that they form connections and solidarities with each other. I wanted to know a little bit more about what your current work is, what directions it's been taking this summer. The last thing that I saw that you had made was from 2021, the Detrás de la Puerta. I’m curious to hear more about where you're going these days?
Professor Camila Daniel (Professor Daniel): Yeah, I started collaborating with Latin American immigrants in Rio in 2011. In 2016, I expanded the collaboration to Latin American immigrants in Baltimore. This experience made me realize that I also needed to understand my positionality as a Black Brazilian anthropologist. I am currently changing my perspective in a way that I'm looking at myself and Brazil more now than I used to. I am transitioning to be more connected with Black communities in Brazil, and finding a way to do what I've been doing in the US, which is conducting research that is strongly connected with community organizing. I was doing that in Baltimore, and this is what I've been doing in Brazil, especially from the pandemic to now.
Tommy: I remember when I was speaking with Runnie about your work early on, she seemed very excited about the way that you think about dance as part of a Black feminist practice or part of an anticolonial epistemology. I wonder if you wanted to talk more about that because it seems like that must relate to why it has helped sustain you as well.
Professor Daniel: Definitely. Yeah, I do believe that. That makes me think about Victoria Santa Cruz. She was an Afro-Peruvian, dancer, choreographer, and intellectual. And even though she has a very philosophical way of understanding dance, she says that we should dance instead of talking and writing about dance. The more we talk or write about dancing, the less we are living the experience of dancing itself. Dancing completely changed my way of seeing myself as a Black woman, my connection with other people and the way I am in academia.
I just realized talking to Runnie and introducing Runnie to my world in Rio that all my close friends dance. All of them, all in different ways. And most of them are Black women. At some point in our lives, we all understood that we needed to nurture life despite the expectations of society. Moving our body in dance is our way of existing, not accepting the limitations that society puts on Black women.
Society is always requiring us, Black women, to do things for them, to help them, to take care of them, to give them answers. And we have very few moments that we can just concentrate on ourselves, be ourselves, and exist. So I think we all understand dancing is a space for us to exist. We are not producing anything, we are not going to get any money out of it. We are just gonna 'be'. I do believe that dance is anticolonial for me and my Black friends. It is a way of not surrendering to the capitalist demand on Black women to be productive for someone else.
Tommy: Thank you.
Professor Daniel: I don't know if Runnie would like to say [something], because she met me at Columbia and I’m sure she was there when I said in class that I dance [in Harlem] at least once a week to survive. Dancing in Black spaces is really core to me.
This dialogues with Lélia Gonzalez, who is a Black Brazilian intellectual, is her concept of Amefricanidade. Lélia analyzes the connections in Latin America made through Black people and Black cultures. They construct a continental sense of belonging not centered in whiteness. In Latin America, people spend so much of our time denying racism and supporting white supremacy. I just feel white spaces anywhere in the world are very tiring for me. So I prefer dancing and moving my body in Black spaces. [...]
Tommy: Yeah. I don’t know Runnie if you wanted to say anything.
Runnie Exuma (Runnie): I wanted to just chime in and ask Professor Daniel a few more questions, having spent time with her the past couple of weeks. My first question was related to the work that you were doing on Lélia Gonzalez and Beatriz Nascimento in Columbia, and the conferences that you held at Columbia related to those two thinkers, and how you were able to bring in so many other Black women, Brazilian intellectuals to think with you, and present at the conferences. I first had a question about the story of how you discovered both Nascimento and Gonzalez, and the significance that they hold in your work. And also the significance of holding those conferences at Columbia, and the reason that you decided to plan it and make it happen.
So that's the first set of questions, and then the second set of questions would have to be in relation to the work we've been doing with the community of Horto with Emília, and also working with the Quilombo (Boa Esperança) here in Rio, and why that's work that you decide to participate in, too.
Professor Daniel: Okay, that is nice, because Runnie is my connection with Columbia and Brazil. When I went to Columbia, I was really aware that it was a really important opportunity for me as a scholar. But I wanted it not to be important only for me, but also for other Black women in Latin America. [...]
Black women were in the forefront of everything that I did at Columbia. They were also the forefront of the syllabus that I taught there. The first time I read Lélia Gonzalez and heard her concept of Amefricanidade was in 2015. It really blew my mind. I had been collaborating with Peruvians since 2011. Thinking about connections in Latin America, and how the continent is constructed, was really important to me. But I was like, Wow! My dissertation could have been so different if I had heard about Amefricanidade and Lélia Gonzalez before. Lélia Gonzalez published a paper about Amefricanidade in 1988. I was born in 1984. I went to university in 2002. From 1988 to 2002 was a long process. There is no reason why I never heard about Lélia Gonzalez during my whole university life. I pursued my Ph.D. in the same university that Gonzalez was working at when she passed. She was the head of the Sociology Department. The same department that I went to for my Ph.D. Even there, people didn't talk about her. Up to now, not only Lélia Gonzalez, but also so many other Black intellectuals, are still taken for granted. The work of learning about them is really an activist work: not reproducing the mainstream social sciences, or any other science in Brazil still committed to white supremacy. [...] I took so long to learn about Black Brazilian intellectuals, […] And the reason why I didn't know them was because I was still focused on mainstream academia, which means white.
But there are lots of Black students and professors all over Brazil, and even abroad, doing so much with her name and her concept. When I was at Columbia, I thought: "Okay, I'm going to have resources at Columbia. So everything that I'm going to do there will be Black women", as a means to making Amefricanidade not only a theory, but a political strategy of fostering Black women’s connections in the world.
[...] I wanted the audience abroad to learn that there are a lot of Black women producing knowledge in different dimensions of life. I wanted to explore the resources that Columbia had. […]
The conference was the possibility of putting in dialogue Black Brazilian women who are living in the U.S. and who are inside the U.S. community, and also Black Brazilians who are still here in Brazil, whose knowledge is still not incorporated into white universities in Brazil.
Columbia plays a very important role in giving visibility to Brazilian intellectuals. For example, one of the main ideologies to silence racism in Brazil is "racial democracy”. One of the intellectuals who constructed the “racial democracy” framework was Gilberto Freyre. He was a Master’s student in Anthropology at Columbia. He took classes with Franz Boas. He wrote Casa-Grande & Senzala in 1932. He went to Columbia in the twenties.
Tommy: Hmm!
Professor Daniel: So I felt that Columbia has this debt with Brazil because we are still struggling so much with the myth of racial democracy. I felt, Well, I'm gonna be at Columbia, […] I can explore a little bit of these resources to open up this platform to other people to hear these Latin Black women who are producing knowledge. [...]
I hosted several events, and all of them - yeah - all of the events I hosted at Columbia was with Black women. Most of them were Black Brazilian women, but also we had a panel with an Afro-Venezuelan and an Afro-Peruvian scholar.
Tommy: [...] When I was looking at Detrás de la Puerta, I really noticed that it was a way of dancing that you could feel the sense of joy that was being shared, you could feel a sense of freedom, and mutual encouragement, and it seemed very reciprocal. And so everything connects back to dancing, but within these relationships that are based on reciprocity instead of on trying to consume Black women in different ways.
Professor Daniel: Yeah, I think one thing I've been talking to Runnie, is to me to be a Black anthropologist is reciprocity. […] If Peruvian immigrants decided that they didn’t want me to be part of the community, I wouldn’t have my dissertation, I wouldn’t have learned how to dance Afro-Peruvian dances, and maybe I would have taken longer to learn Spanish. […]
Most of what I constructed in my career comes from the relationship I constructed with [Peruvian immigrants in Rio] since 2011. I wouldn't be a Columbia professor if I didn't have this very particular trajectory, which is a Black Brazilian anthropologist studying race from Peruvian immigrants’ perspective. This is something very unusual and was only possible because Peruvians accepted me as part of the community…
Sometimes, scholars forget that first, most of the knowledge that we learn and write about comes from the community. Especially in anthropology. Even the concepts. Lots of the concepts are native concepts. They are not ours. And secondly, we need to listen to people in order to give them back what they want, what they believe is useful for them. As a Black woman, people are always trying to extract things from me. As a Black scholar, I don't wanna do the same. That's why I believe that Black women's standpoint can be very powerful. My experience in life is strongly related to the experience of communities who are dealing with anthropologists who are expecting to extract things from them. So I don't want to do to them what people try to do to me very often.
[…] I should explain why I’m talking a lot about myself. … I understand being decolonial is acknowledging the place that I am in the world, that things are not casual… there are relations, there are forces, there are networks that make things possible. That's why I'm always talking in the first person. Just to make things clear. I don't want to sound like because I'm a Black Brazilian who taught at Columbia that I am a superwoman. I'm definitely not a superwoman. I was blessed enough to have lots of people supporting me…
Professor Daniel: Tommy, there is another question that Runnie asked me about the work that I'm doing now in Rio. [...]
One of the panels I hosted (at Columbia), the Amefrican dialogues, was about environmental racism in Brazil with two Black women who are community leaders in two favelas in Rio. Actually one of them's a community, it’s not specifically a favela. And a Black scholar, who is also a friend of mine, who is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on environmental racism in Brazil with these two communities… We hosted this panel, and this is how Runnie heard about Comunidade do Horto. […] when Runnie told me that she was thinking about coming to Rio, I told her, “Well Communidade do Horto is needing help to reopen their Facebook account… So that would be a way to support their struggle.”
So my work with the community, I feel like I'm not doing research with them. I am supporting a community that is struggling. …I’m doing activist work. […] the things that I read and my ethical practice as a Black scholar makes me committed with this community.
And the other work that I was invited to support is with a Quilombo community… There is one Quilombo community near Areal, Rio de Janeiro. They have the project of constructing their own museum. So they are in the process of creating the collective awareness of their own history, and elaborate their archives… they also want to develop a specific school curriculum for the quilombola children.
I have a student who is working there. She invited me to go to the Quilombo. Since that, I’ve been talking to the Quilombo, and asking them how I can support. I am in this process of learning about them and learning about their struggle.
Several other people has been doing research there. I am trying to understand what happened to all this research. The community has been making the same demands for many, many years. What happened to all this research? […] I'm now trying to understand the relations between the scholars who have been there, the local politicians who understood that the quilombo is important and are trying to make the quilombo more visible, and the community - what they really want. And also the internal conflicts they have. I am in the process of understanding the community and asking them. I'm constantly doing that, asking them, “How can I support? What can I do?”
And one thing that I've been thinking: connections are very important. Nobody does anything alone, especially if we are people of color. We are not gonna do anything alone. This is the modern society ideal that doesn't make any sense for people of color. [...] One thing that I always remember is that when Runnie told her parents—Runnie, you can tell it better than I.
Runnie: Yeah, I can talk about it. One of the reasons why I was really excited about visiting the quilombo was because of the process that they have of making rapadura. Rapadura is basically condensed, unrefined sugar. I was asking them how long it takes them to make, and the whole process of cutting down the sugar and milling it, and everything takes about the whole day, but the full process can take up to a week.
And I remember telling my parents that, especially as I was planning to go to Rio. I'm Haitian, and my parents are Haitian migrants, and our whole history, from my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather on both sides, they have always been farm workers and doing farm work has always been a part of my family. It's something that my mom grew up with, which is why, to this day, we can be walking somewhere, and she's able to identify all these different plant types, and the season that they grow. Things like that that I've always been really curious about.
So once I said the word rapadura, because the word is so similar to the word in Haitian Creole, which is rapadou, my dad got really excited, and he was like, “My grandfather used to make this on his farm, and he used to teach me the whole process of making it.” He grew up with that. And so when I was coming here, he just gave me the message that once I go visit the quilombo I should just learn as much as I can. That's what he told me. “Go and learn. Learn everything; learn as much as you can,” and also to bring some back for him, because I guess that's one of the things of migrant experiences. There are certain foods that you haven't had in years, but they cultivate so much memory and knowledge for you, and they bring up so much for you.
So that was my plan number one when I got to the quilombo, and I told the people there the story, and they were like, “Wow, I didn't know.” Even just the similarity between the words and the two languages. You know, it was really cool but it's also, the experience of going and realizing the similarity and practices of this one place in Rio compared to Haiti, and how all of this is just kind of Blackness and diaspora in effect, and we're all connected by this terrible history, but, and there's this beauty, and in the in the spirit of Amefricanidade, seeing certain practices repeat throughout the Americas, connected by this [inaudible] Blackness, it's been cool. That was a really top experience for me.
Professor Daniel: [...] This amazing possibility of learning different experiences of Blackness, and learning about the diasporic connection of Blackness. I didn't know about Haiti so I am learning too, through Runnie. I really had no idea about that, and also for them [the quilombolas] to realize that what they are doing is important for them. There is a connection with other Black people, so they learn how great this connection is. … I’m not romanticizing. [...] They have lots of struggles. But despite the struggles, they are cultivating ancestral connections that make them part of the diaspora, and that is really life-affirming.
Tommy: I notice this recurring theme of learning about the connections that were already there? They are coming into more and more awareness. That seems like such a central and important part of what is being produced by your work and the way that you are both forming these relationships to people, to communities. [...]
Runnie: That's a huge part of having worked with you the past couple of weeks. I think I've seen, even in visiting the Quilombo, and posting the performances of capoeira and whatnot. There are a lot of people who reached out to me who were like, “Oh, my gosh! This looks like Puerto Rican Bomba,” which is another style of dance and performance, and, all these other people being like, “I'm from x country in Latin America, and this is something that we have here, too,” and being able to make the connections.
And also with the rapadura, I started looking it up more, and it has different names in different parts of Latin America. I think it's called piloncillo in Mexico, and then in Colombia it's called panela, and it's all these Black Latin American Caribbean people having their own practices for making it, and different words. It’s really cool.
Professor Daniel: And that is exactly what the concept of Amefricanidade is. Being able to see this Black connections despite—despite violence, despite the project of erasing everything that is Black. We still have these connections even though we might not be aware of. So for me it’s so powerful, because the work of trying to make Black people fit into a white world in Latin America and in the Caribbean and in the diaspora is so oppressive. But there are still resistances.
Tommy: [...] Are there final thoughts that you or Runnie wanted to share?
Professor Daniel: I do believe we are able to construct connections that are not centered in whiteness, and that are life-affirming. And academia, even though it causes a lot of problems, can also be a means of constructing alternatives of living, of being together, of… creating reciprocity and alternatives of life that are not centered on coloniality and capitalism and individualism… My process of claiming my humanity and my existence is also what moves me to do my work as a researcher, and question the centrality of whiteness in academia and in the political world, and use academia as a resource to other possibilities of life.
Tommy: [Reading from chat] Runnie says, talk about what you see yourself doing next.
Professor Daniel: …I do wanna do more activist research in Brazil and Rio… This week I hosted an event at my university, for the international day of Black Latin American Caribbean women. I talked, Runnie talked, and one of the speakers was a student of mine. …she started a samba space, a space to preserve the samba in Três Rios, in the town where I work. [...]
One thing that Runnie has been asking too and I forgot to relate to, is the concept of Quilombo from the Black Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento. In the eighties she constructed a different meaning for Quilombo. Before Beatriz Nascimento, Quilombo was considered any community of enslaved people who escaped from slavery. Nascimento defined quilombo not as a specific place encapsulated in the colonial horizon. But Quilombo is a way that Black people develop a different philosophy of living which is centered in Black solidarity. Quilombo is a philosophy real not only in the Quilombo itself, but also in other Black spaces, such as the favelas and the samba schools. Sambas are these Black connections that Black people support each other. For example, if someone has no food, then that person who has more will give to the other one. And one person takes care of the other person's kid. So all this Black solidarity is what she calls Quilombo… Thinking about this concept, I want to study the samba schools in Três Rios as a Quilombo, as an ethical philosophical way of living Black lives. This is what I’m doing now. At some point, I want to connect the samba schools in Três Rios with the Quilombo, the actual quilombo. Well, everything is actual quilombo, but Quilombo Boa Esperança, the Black rural community I am collaborating with.
These are my goals by now. But I also have an artistic political goal […] to start a Black dance collective.
Tommy: I feel like there's so much more to talk about, even with just the expectations around ethnography and the like amount of work that that is, and how the model of colonial ethnography really sets that up. But yeah. I also wanna be respectful of your time, for both of you. I really appreciate you both taking time to be here and Runnie like, thank you so much for you know, facilitating this and doing all of that work. I really appreciate it.
Professor Daniel: Thank you so much. Thank you, Runnie, for so supporting Tomoki in their process of organizing this interview, and also Tomoki for not giving up even though I’m not in Columbia anymore. This interview is also a reminder for myself that I'm doing a nice work.
Prison Education and Teaching Incarcerated Students
Over the 2021-2022 academic year, the Prison Education and Social Justice Curricula working group—comprised of Columbia University faculty, graduate student workers, members of the Justice-in-Education (JIE) initiative, and local prison education workers—has been meeting regularly to develop courses to be taught in prison contexts and to prepare for the challenges involved in this new kind of teaching.
Since 2015, Columbia faculty who want to teach as part of the JIE initiative can offer Columbia courses to students at various city, state, and federal facilities in New York, such as Rikers, MDC Brooklyn, Sing Sing, Taconic, Queenboro, and Edgecomb. Some of our working group participants—including Jean Howard, Kate Suffern, Julie Crawford, Julie Peters, Jeremy Dodd, and Jason Resnikoff—already have experience teaching in prison contexts.
But this was not true of all our participants. Indeed, the majority joined the group with a desire to teach in prisons but without detailed knowledge of what the process entailed. In our initial meetings, we spent time listening to and learning from those who have experience dealing with the unique circumstances of prison education. While we want to offer the same kind of education in prison contexts that we offer on Columbia’s main campuses, it is important to remember that prison education has its own challenges—for instance, there are specific procedures for the clearance of instructors and their syllabi, as well as limited resources in terms of libraries and classroom equipment. To prepare Columbia faculty and graduate instructors for prison education, we hope to codify our learning in the form of a training guide in the coming year.
With the input of formerly incarcerated students and experts in prison education, the group learned about the kinds of classes that students most enjoyed and the disciplines in which there is the greatest need for courses. From our discussion, it became clear that students are eager to engage with the intellectual content of courses from across the whole spectrum of academic disciplines, from Astronomy to Music, from Physics to English. At the moment, more courses are offered in the humanities than in the sciences and social sciences. While Professors Jeremy Dodd (Physics), Jennifer Middleton (Earth Studies), Geraldine Downey (Psychology), and Caroline Marvin (Psychology) have or will be offering courses in these areas, there remains strong demand for courses in biology and chemistry, as well as in sociology, political science, history, economics, and other disciplines.
This is an imbalance we would like to address going forward. One difficulty is the necessity of preliminary mathematics instruction in order take many classes in a discipline such as Astronomy, but a science subgroup, including Professor Marcel Agüeros, is working on a solution to this issue. In terms of the social sciences, we hope in the coming year to recruit more faculty and graduate workers to develop courses in these disciplines for the prison context.
Looking ahead to this summer, fall, and spring, participants in our working group have developed an exciting array of courses that will be taught at a variety of prisons. Professors Jack Halberstam, Tey Meadows, Rebecca Jordan Young, and Mia Florin-Sefton have been designing an introductory-level Gender and Sexuality course, and Mia will be teaching a version of this over the summer. Professor Middleton is teaching an introductory-level Earth Studies course; Professor Frances Negrón-Muntaner is teaching a course on “Latino Culture and the Global City”; Professor Dodd is teaching a course in Physics; Professor Howard is teaching a course on “Shakespeare and Global Adaptations”; Professor Peters is teaching a course on “Law and Literature”; and Professor Marvin is teaching a course in Cognitive Science.
In addition to formalizing training processes, expanding graduate worker involvement in prison education, and broadening course offerings in prisons, we plan in the coming year to continue developing an undergraduate concentration in “Frontiers of Justice,” which will allow undergraduates on Columbia’s main campuses to engage in social justice projects in the local community. We are excited about all of these developments and look forward to the work ahead.
Patrick Anson is a PhD Candidate in English and Comparative Literature. He is writing a part-ethnographic, part-literary-critical dissertation about programs that propose reading groups focused on 20th and 21st century narrative literature as a means to address a range of social problems, from mass incarceration, where a reading group functions as an alternative sentence for people convicted of an offense, to military trauma, where a reading group helps to establish social connections among veterans.
Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies, prison literature, and theater history.
Reflecting on the Body in George & Maria’s Workshops
The central focus of George Sanchez and Maria Jose Contreras’ workshops (in October and November respectively) was the body: the body that “keeps the score” of its habits, desires, and accumulated traumas, whether or not that score ever makes its way into verbal expression or outward acknowledgement. The goal of these workshops was to explicitly offer that acknowledgement: to make the score visible, legible, and communal, rather than burying it in the rush of “going back to normal life” after a year of COVID lockdown, precarity, illness, and death. The goal was also to find expressions for it that were not entirely linguistic: to use the body itself, and its myriad senses, to bring out the body’s aches and sores. As such, two central activities from the workshop stood out the most to me: George’s “Image of Covid” activity (adapted from Augusto Boal’s image-theatre) and Maria’s “Body Maps.”
The “Images of Covid” activity was powerful because it came on the heels of “Images of Power,” in which we were encouraged to set up three chairs, a table, and a water bottle in such a way that gave one of the chairs ultimate power over the rest. It was only after interrogating various permutations of these objects and analyzing what power meant to us as a group that George prompted us to create a similar “image” to capture the Covid experience. One participant, Thomonique, took the lead, and the “image” wound up being a woman feeling the temperature of a reclining (and potentially dying) man, while a couple held hands at a distance and wept. On the face of it, this image was less “impressive” than the inanimate and highly imaginative images of power that preceded it. But what it allowed the participants to do was share their experiences organically as prompted by the image before them. This organic story-telling that emerged from the group was worlds apart from more stilted variations of “processing the pandemic” that I have experienced in the past, in which folks go around in a circle and confess their suffering to strangers. Though I had experienced George’s workshop once before among only ZCMP fellows in September, this moment had not taken place the first time, largely because we inadvertently settled into the more familiar sharing-in-a-circle structure at the time. This, however, was far more moving. The stories participants shared were unprompted, and all used the image as a jumping-off point for their personal lives.
Maria’s “Body Maps” succeeded in an entirely different way: rather than encouraging us to focus on the events of the past year (the “plot points” within the monotony, as it were), it gave us sounds, shapes, and colors through which to narrate our body’s unique journey through the pandemic—a story we otherwise would have no space to really tell. We were asked to trace outlines of one another on large canvases and then draw within those outlines where the pandemic had left its marks on our bodies and how. Each map turned out completely unique. For some folks, the body was loud: ambulance sirens blaring within the mind, fires engulfing the heart and lungs, shackles chaining the arms and legs. For others, it was silent: empty spaces, vines winding through the legs and arms, an astronaut’s glass shell surrounding the head, or the head transforming into a luminous laptop screen. The stories we told through the artworks then manifested in speech. Maria asked us to explain the effect on our bodies to one another through a match exercise—we had to speak for as long as the match was burning, then pass a match to the next person in the circle. The maps we had just drawn seeped into our stories, and the focus on the match’s weak light took pressure away from the verbal constructions themselves. It was a magical moment, much like the one with Thomonique’s image in George’s workshop. Some folks cried in the small window of time their match gave them; others expressed their gratitude for the bodies they had come to find themselves in. In that way, the workshops completed one another, moving between visual and embodied stories, and transforming the most private and intimate memories into elements of collective experience.
Author Bio: Aya Labanieh is a Ph.D. candidate in the English and Comparative Literature Department, where she works on imperial conspiracies and their conspiracy-theory afterlives in 20th and 21st century Middle Eastern literature and politics. Her broader interests include conspiratorial thinking within a global digital context, and how conspiracy theories function as alternate histories, heretical discourses, popular critiques, epistemic injuries, and modern enchantments.
The Zip Code Memory Project seeks to find community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods. Through a series of art-based workshops, public events, social media platforms, and a final performance/exhibition at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, community members participate in building networks of shared responsibility and belonging.
Representing Covid through Boal’s Image-Theater
Images of “Covid:”
#1. A person lies on a bench with both hands resting on their stomach and eyes half-closed. Another person stands with one of their hands placed on the forehead of the person lying down. The person lying down does not see the person who has a hand on their forehead. At a certain distance, two people stand behind some chairs holding hands and looking in the direction of the person lying down.
#2. A person sits on the ground with their legs outstretched. Another person lies on the ground with their upper body rested on the other person’s lap. The person sitting on the ground embraces the person lying on their lap with both arms and holds them.
#3. A group of people sit cross-legged on the ground in a circle. They all face the outside of the circle, with their backs turned to the center of the circle. Everyone in the circle holds their head down with both hands over their head. No one sees or touches another person.
These three images of “Covid” were created in the “Rehearsals for Change” workshops that took place in the past three weekends. We were asked to use the bodies of other participants to build a “sculpture” of “Covid” (Boal 143). As in Boal’s Image-Theater, we were “not allowed to speak under any circumstances” (144). Instead of verbally expressing our opinions about “Covid,” we had to come up with a “physical representation” of it (144).
Boal’s Image-Theater (like his Poetics of the Oppressed more broadly) focuses on the body as a means of theatrical production. “The means of production of the theater are constituted by [people] . . . the first word in the theatrical vocabulary is the body, the main source of sound and movement” (131). To get to know one’s own body and to make it “more expressive” are arguably the most important steps in Boal’s Poetics of the Oppressed and its goal of transforming “spectators” into “actors” who “assume the protagonist role, change the dramatic action, rehearse possible solutions, [and] discuss plans for change,” thus “preparing themselves for real action” (126).
In his discussion of Image-Theater, Boal mentions themes like “imperialism” or more “local problems, like the lack of access to running water” (143). Reading Boal’s TO in the context of the ongoing global pandemic, we think of “Covid,” and the focus of Image-Theater on non-verbal physical expression seems particularly conducive to representing “Covid” if we consider the ways in which many experiences and emotions associated with the pandemic seem to defy verbal articulation. As Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, the “imprint” of painful experiences are often “organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces: images, sounds, and physical sensations” (211). In our workshops, many of us mentioned the sound of ambulance sirens and the image of refrigerator trucks parked at the entrance of hospitals — two “traces” (one sonic, one visual) that powerfully express something about our experience of the pandemic. If many “imprints” of the ongoing pandemic are organized in “traces” such as images, Boal’s Image-Theater offers us a tool to use our bodies (the same bodies that “keep the score” of what we’ve been going through) to express and share these “traces.”
In Image-Theater, a participant is asked to build a “physical representation of the proposed theme,” and, subsequently, “another image showing how they would like the proposed theme to be. In other words: the first grouping shows the real image, while the second shows the ideal image. With these two images, a participant is asked to show what would be, for them, the transitional image. We have a reality that we want to transform; how do we transform it?” (Boal 144). Using the example of a young woman who lived in a “small pueblo, called Otuzco,” in Peru, Boal describes an image in which leaders of a peasant revolt were publicly tortured in the town’s central square (144). Boal describes this image as “terrible, tragic, pessimistic, defeatist, but, at the same time, an image of something that really happened” (145). The young woman transformed this real image into an ideal image in which “people worked in peace and loved each other . . . in short, [the image of] a happy Otuzco” (145).
#1. A person lies on a bench with both hands resting on their stomach and eyes half-closed. Another person stands with one of their hands placed on the forehead of the person lying down. The person lying down does not see the person who has a hand on their forehead. At a certain distance, two people stand behind some chairs holding hands and looking in the direction of the person lying down.
What happens when you have a real image that isn’t only “terrible, tragic, pessimistic, defeatist”? The image of “Covid” that Thomonique created in our first workshop has things we would probably like to change. We would like to see health workers (the person with one of their hands placed on the forehead of the person lying down) also cared for and comforted, and justly compensated for their essential labor. We would like to see family members (the two people standing behind the barricade of chairs) not totally isolated from their loved ones, somehow feeling like they too are caring for and comforting each other in a difficult moment. And yet, as the person lying down in this particular image, I felt the warmth of Susan’s hand on my forehead. Similarly, Julie, who was embraced and held in Image #2 (created by Nazia), expressed feeling comforted and protected. “Gestures of comfort” like touching or holding “makes us feel intact, safe, protected, and in charge” (Kolk 253). Touch, when “attuned” (253) and “mindful” (254), is “the most elementary tool that we have to calm down” (253). Such “gestures of comfort” and the affection and hope they elicit are things we would like to keep as we struggle to transform our reality into something closer to what we want it to be.
#2. A person sits on the ground with their legs outstretched. Another person lies on the ground with their upper body rested on the other person’s lap. The person sitting on the ground embraces the person lying on their lap with both arms and holds them.
Perhaps the real image of “Covid” in most need of transformation is Image #3 (created by Leah). The gestures in this image seem to be gestures not of comfort but of distress, especially the gesture of holding one’s head down with both hands. This is the only image in which people touch themselves, but not others. They are in the same circle, yet deeply alone. Maybe we would like each person in the circle to place one of their hands on someone else’s forehead, and to have another person’s hand placed on their forehead. Maybe we would like each person in the circle to hold someone else, and to be held. If this is the real image of “Covid,” maybe the ideal image would not be that different from the circle with which we closed each of the workshops — one where everyone stands turned to the center of the circle with arms interlocked with those of the people next to them. If this is the ideal image, what would be the transitional image? How do we get from the circle in Image #3 to the circle at the end of the workshops? Maybe the workshop is the transition, the circle of chairs where we first meet at the start of the day, and the circle of chairs where we later discuss the images of “Covid” and what it means to us before standing up for the final circle.
#3. A group of people sit cross-legged on the ground in a circle. They all face the outside of the circle, with their backs turned to the center of the circle. Everyone in the circle holds their head down with both hands over their head. No one sees or touches another person.
Image-Theater is “one of the most stimulating [forms]” of the Poetics of the Oppressed (147). It stimulates the “desire” to practice what was rehearsed in the workshops, a “certain lack of satisfaction” that Boal calls “ímpeto revolucionário” — a moving force that seeks “fulfillment” through political struggle (152). Together, the three images of “Covid” that came out of our workshops suggest that gestures of comfort and the feelings they elicit are key to any “ímpeto revolucionário” and to our struggles to change the unjust realities that have been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic.
Boal, Augusto. Teatro do oprimido e outras poéticas políticas. Civilização brasileira, 1991.
Kolk, Bessel van der. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
Author Bio: Guilherme Meyer is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of English at New York University. My dissertation project deals with prophetic utopianism, which is a mode of utopianism that engages in prophetic denunciation-annunciation as a means to sustain revolutionary praxis. He is a co-chair of the Marxism working group in the Department of English and an organizer in the union for graduate workers at NYU, GSOC-UAW Local 2110.
The Zip Code Memory Project seeks to find community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods. Through a series of art-based workshops, public events, social media platforms, and a final performance/exhibition at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, community members participate in building networks of shared responsibility and belonging.
An email after a visit to La Morada
This post contains an email that I shared with Diana Taylor, Marianne Hirsch, and Lee Xie after visiting La Morada in the Bronx with Aya Labanieh on September 7th, 2021.
Dear all,
As I said in my previous email, the experience today was amazing and fulfilling. We spent many hours peeling beets and carrots and getting to talk with the members of La Morada. We made hand corrections on the date of the call and left a note next to the fliers saying that there were workshops available for kids. Unfortunately, families weren’t picking up veggies today. That will happen next Monday. I plan to go back there to volunteer a few more hours next week, and I can then distribute fliers to these families.
Photographer Camila Falquez, who did a project for El Pais (Spain) titled Queens of New York in which Natalia Mendez (main chef and organizer at La Morada) was included, came with us to volunteer. We had the chance to spend some time in the kitchen talking to Natalia and Marco, thanks to Camila, and also get a sense of the mutual aid work they undertake, how much work they do, and how vital it is for them to get people to help. We also went with Yajaira and Angeles to the community garden they started back in the spring. It’s an incredible space where they teach people to grow their own food and do workshops on medicinal plants for people in the neighborhood. The beauty and amount of work they do, which I got to know about while working at Hemi, is overwhelming. The level to which they take care and conversation made me wish that they could be taken as a model for public humanities, and I am absolutely serious about this.
Aya and I had a beautiful chance to talk and discuss the intended target for the workshops and thought that volunteers would be interested in applying and could also be the ones with time to apply and commit to attending workshops. We talked to Marco and Jacob (a regular volunteer) so that they can distribute the fliers among them as well as the regular families who come in search of mutual aid support.
At some point at the end of the afternoon, a basketball player (a famous one) showed up. He and his media team came to take a series of pictures for his social media. The pictures were supposed to show him doing some social justice/community work. Natalia was joking back in the kitchen about how these celebrities come over to “help” but end up making all the work more difficult and slow. That’s how it happened today, and as Natalia had predicted, the guy peeled a few potatoes, made a donation, and left. His media team, a bunch of white men, basically stopped the cooking process for almost 30 mins because, for them taking the picture was more important than the work that was taking place there.
That moment made me think of the Lorraine O’Grady retrospective organized by the Brooklyn Museum recently, in particular the piece “Art is…” which is one of my favorite works of art (obviously because it is a carnival-inspired work). Here is a summary of the work: Art is. A fascinating aspect of this work is that instead of creating more artworks, O’Grady finds a way of framing the people of Harlem themselves as works of art. I would be more than happy to share more reflections about this piece at a meeting and also some of her writing about it. But I wanted to bring this up because it seems to me like a great example of how documenting/registering what is already happening could be more powerful and “artistic” than coming as outsiders to execute a new project. While peeling beets with Aya, we got to talk briefly about Saidiya Hartman’s “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” so I would like to pull out a fragment from it as it has helped me to see the artistic and unseen potential of mutual aid efforts and somehow it also makes me think of O’Grady’s and the potential that the ZCMP holds:
“The mutual aid society survived the Middle Passage, and its origins might be traced to traditions of collectivity, which nourished in the stateless societies that preceded the breach of the Atlantic and perdured in its wake. This form of mutual assistance was remade in the hold of the slave ship, the plantation, and the ghetto. It made good the ideals of the collective, the ensemble, the always-more-than-one of existing in the world. The mutual aid society was a resource of black survival. The ongoing and open-ended creation of new conditions of existence and improvisation of life-enhancing and free association was a practice crafted in social clubs, tenements, taverns, dance halls, disorderly houses, and the streets.”
It seems to me that the re-emergence of mutual aid projects in NYC and around the globe during the current pandemic deserves attention. They might not work as memorials themselves, but, as Hartman points out, they constitute themselves a practice that we did not forget. And in not forgetting this collective practice resides a powerful potential for remembrance as these people have been in direct contact with those who lost jobs, family members, etc.
I’m attaching a few photographs of the community garden and some “memorials” I came across while walking around the neighborhood. The candle memorials, which are also very popular in Brooklyn and the LES, have always attracted me as they stand to serve many social functions in these communities when someone dies violently. They are placed in the spot where the person has been killed and are composed primarily of candles, spirits (liquors), food, cigars, coffee, photographs, and personal objects. I’m curious to know if someone has written about them. I’ll check out and let you know if I find something.
Sorry for my messy thoughts and writing. It’s late and I’m tired but excited for the opportunity you have created for us to do something meaningful. Thanks, Marianne and Diana!
Best,
Luis Rincón Alba
Mapping Out
November 20, 2021 Group Workshop with Maria
We as a collective attempted to connect through body movement. Like molecules we bumped and diverged, spreading in all directions at different speeds. After a while we were asked to trace ourselves to the past. So we made body maps. Laid them out flat and traced the outline of our present selves while filling the bodies with loss, fears, memories, thoughts and even hope.
I traveled through the incessant cries and frustrations of my children and through my own memories of feeling trapped, scared and in pain from the sickness.
As I drew the inside of my body map I began to outline green vines, wrapping my body, circling around my feet, protecting me from myself? I wasn’t sure, but I kept going with it. I had to see how the vines were going to get me out of my own head. And they did.
Even though my hands were tied in a pink bow and I felt helpless, even though knives like death were threatening me from all sides, I felt the green vines were going to bring me back.
When I stood up and looked at my body map from a distance I was overwhelmed by the image of my own body, “is that my body?” I asked myself, “who am I?”
People who walked by commented but I stood there and tried to capture the feeling. I was sad by how quickly I forgot or rather got used to the pain brought on by the pandemic without even giving it a breath of release.
After everyone was done we hung up our bodies on the back walls of the auditorium. We walked circles around the hung bodies and we mourned together. We shared stories inside the bodies. We commemorated the bodies we had hoped were left behind for good. Some bodies didn’t want to be left behind, they were the lucky ones.
Once we attempted at peace with ourselves, we were asked to now mark our neighborhood maps, maps of our physical space during COVID, maps of our stagnation. That wasn’t hard. I had a hard time finding myself on the map, where did I live? Where did I go during this time? Why couldn’t I find my street. So I went to another group’s map because I didn’t want to be alone. There I found three spots that situated me on the map and I suddenly felt at ease. I told some people about the places I marked. Hudson River path near my home where I walked regularly and let kids ride their bikes while cursing unmasked runners under my mask. I marked my block where I spent almost a year in isolation with my family. I also made a mark where I work, far from home but a place where I was told I had to be even if I was afraid. When I tried to look for a place where we would go to escape, near Bear Mountain, it wasn’t on the map. It was not part of the map that was handed to me. I guess the escape is just not part of the big picture but a distant place, hidden and off the radar. It’s better that way, less chance of it getting contaminated.
After the Workshop I somehow felt closer to myself, like I got to know myself a bit better. The workshop allowed me the time and space to feel and be with my thoughts and memories and that was enough to begin the journey of healing from the past COVID to the present COVID. And even though the pandemic is still in full swing, I now know where I can be found.
Author Bio: Leah Kogen-Elimeliah is a poet, essayist, short story and nonfiction writer from Moscow, currently living in New York City. She is an MFA candidate at City College of New York, is the Founder and Director of WordShedNYC Reading Series and an Editorial Associate for Fiction literary magazine. Her writing focuses on immigration, identity, language, sexuality and culture. She is a member of the ZIP Code Memory Project.
The Zip Code Memory Project seeks to find community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods. Through a series of art-based workshops, public events, social media platforms, and a final performance/exhibition at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, community members participate in building networks of shared responsibility and belonging.
Music and the (re)making of territory: A commentary on the Silvio Luiz de Almeida and MC Carol Panel
What is the role of music in (re)definitions of space? What is the role of humor?
In the fourth event of the “Reconstructing History” series, CSSD Geographies of Injustice working group members joined singer and activist MC Carol and professor and attorney Silvio Luiz de Almeida for a conversation on the meanings of territory, experience, theory, and humor in musical production. The working group, led by Professors Ana Paulina Lee and Anupama Rao, recently launched a podcast, titled Music and Migration in Rio and Mumbai’s Favelas. It can be accessed via Rádio Batuta or Spotify.
The guest speakers challenged normative understandings of “territory” by illuminating links between geographical space and conceptualizations of gender, race and class, and thus amplified diverse perspectives on the everyday and its inequalities in Brazil. Diverse not because of the speakers’ neat correspondence to idealized social “types”—the feminist, the Black activist, the favelada, or the academic—but because of their distinct relationship to these categories, their impositions and their possibilities, and the common ground found in the multiplicity of experiences characteristic of the human condition.
Potent. That is how Observatório de Favelas’ Júnior Pimentel characterized MC Carol. Carol has consistently explored music’s potential to open new avenues of thought and self-expression—from her early disagreements with relatives and partners who did not understand her aspirations to sing proudly about the pleasures and pains that made her independent, to her persistence against efforts to subvert her feminist stance. Her deliberate deployment of humor, dismissed by some as unpolished, bridges content and form, allowing Carol to pose difficult and serious questions so that her audience can relate and identify with them.
Carol is a troubadour and a chronicler of Rio’s suburban lives, with a keen sensitivity to everyday favela dynamics. At a first glance, her lyrics may seem like extrapolations, affording the element of dissonance that activates humor. But this exercise of discursive exaggeration is also an act of epistemic expansion, welcoming others to visualize parts of their experiences in the every-day that is Carol’s primary source. As Silvio de Almeida put it, it is in evoking the “absurdities of quotidian life” under a newly legible light that Carol combats individuals’ longstanding alienation from the perception of those absurdities. Political action through affect.
Silvio defined the event’s theme as an observation of “the political construction of the spaces where this affect is produced.” While the affect evoked by MC Carol’s lyrics exposes structures of race, gender, and class-based discrimination, Silvio draws attention to their role in forging cultural and geographic space. What makes a favela? Steep hills, bare-brick houses, “overpopulated” areas? One is sure to find that most if not all favelas challenge neat physical and geographic categorization. Yet the category stands. As territory, favela is more affective than physical. It constitutes itself by the quotidian absurdities, the ways people find around the everyday, their relationship to action and alienation, the presence and absence of the “outside,” which even the state seems part of at times. “Territory is a physical space that is signified,” Silvio affirms, “and what gives meaning to this space are the relationships developed there.” MC Carol’s music and Silvio de Almeida’s teaching meditate on these relationships, how they are produced and resignified through performance, thus paving the way to uncharted territories.
Author Bio: Gabriel A. D. Franco is a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Chicago, studying the intersections of criminal legislation, race, citizenship, and class formation in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Brazil. As a Geographies of Injustice fellow, between 2019 and 2021 he contributed to the production of the podcast Música e migração.
Bombay and Indian Ocean Urbanisms Workshop: Themes, Logistical Challenges, and Opportunities
Workshop Themes and Goals
As a part of the Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City working group we hosted our Bombay and Indian Ocean Urbanisms workshop on Zoom with four sessions spread out over a week between 26 June and 3 July, 2020. Speakers and participants joined the workshop from the US, India, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Singapore, England, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. The full schedule, including presenter names and paper titles, can be found here.
The workshop aimed to think about “Indian Ocean Urbanisms” as a working concept for both Indian Ocean studies and urban studies. The field of Indian Ocean studies has been shaped by studies of mercantile capital and mobility between port cities, of which Bombay has emerged as a preeminent city. Meanwhile, Bombay has become a referent in studies of cities in South Asia due to its history of activism by industrial workers and distinct forms of housing. We wanted to decenter Bombay by placing it in connective and comparative histories with other cities and thus question if we can or should consider distinct urbanisms formed by the ocean space and what can constitute the urban in the Indian Ocean.
While drawing upon the rich studies of labor, housing, and public health in Bombay, our presenters went beyond these established historiographies to consider the ocean as an agent of exchange, think through oceanic port cities comparatively, and connect Bombay with other cities such as Hong Kong, Calcutta, Rangoon, Dar es Salaam, and the seafaring towns of Gulf of Kachchh. The presenters studied connections forged across oceans that impacted functions of the cities such as real estate management, trust funds, oceanic transportations, water supply, and land surveys.
Challenges and Benefits of Moving to an Online Space
We faced some challenges in moving an in-person conference to Zoom within a span of three months, and we share our experience here in the hope that it will help others who are debating whether to host prolonged workshops online or not. We are especially grateful to Ayah Eldosougi at CSSD for making the Zoom events possible.
This workshop was originally planned as an in-person event at Columbia University on 13-14 March, 2020. Both of us graduate organizers travelled to New York from our fieldwork (and eventually got stuck in the US due to flight bans). As the airspace began to grow thin and restricted, we had to quickly cancel hotel reservations for the participants and cancel a few flights as well. Rather than cancelling the event, we decided to postpone it for a later date online because we planned to launch a longer conversation from the workshop.
We finally planned to host it on Zoom once everyone started their summer breaks. We polled availability on Doodle, and scheduled sessions in the morning in New York to accommodate as many time zones as possible. Once on Zoom, we tided over unexpected issues that one has almost begun to expect in the face of a pandemic. One of us (Sohini) had to fly back to India on an evacuation flight, and managed to host the plenary session while quarantined at a hotel in New Delhi. One of our plenary speakers, Mustansir Dalvi, recorded his speech on YouTube to ensure smooth delivery of the address amidst frequent power outages in his Mumbai neighborhood. Plenary speakers Eric Tagliacozzo and Nancy Um and discussants Debjani Bhattacharyya, Sheetal Chhabria and Abigail McGowan joined us from their homes early in the morning to accommodate those of us who were joining later in the night. In order to ensure smooth conversations, some of our discussants also sent written comments in case the internet failed in between conversations. We limited presentations to five minutes each so that we could focus more on discussions and comments. This was done keeping in mind that long lectures on Zoom have been known to cause fatigue.
Zoom also enabled more accessibility. Had it not been for Zoom, we would not have been able to reach out across so many participants in different time zones. Two of our participants who would have otherwise not managed to join us in March ended up presenting their papers on our Zoom edition. Many faculty and architects from institutions in Mumbai and other parts of Western India attended our plenary, which would have otherwise been restricted to urban history/Mumbai enthusiasts in New York. As a result, a part of our plenary talk was hosted at the Art Deco Society of Mumbai. Conversations were also more transparent and open as there were no silos that are sometimes in place at in-person conferences.
We were sharing with our audience the drafts of each paper presented, and wanted to prevent possibilities of plagiarism. In order to prevent this, as well as possible unpleasantness through the new phenomenon of Zoom bombing, we sent out password protected registration links, vetted the participants, and included people whose work had relevance to our conference. When in doubt, we checked Twitter handles or did a quick Google search. As a result, the subsequent workshops had a more limited audience, but we maintained a secure environment.
The online workshop was also an occasion for us to think about the salience of an in-person event. We missed our post-conference interpersonal conversations that often create enduring academic friendships and connections, where we draw intellectual inspirations and create the possibility of parallel collaborations. But by spreading the sessions out over a week, we also managed to avoid some fatigue that might arise from an all-day conference. Our participants were extremely engaged and enthusiastic and we hope that this online workshop has fostered an active global network of scholars and practitioners dedicated to answering questions surrounding mobility, capital, urban forms, and urban life.
Contributed by Sohini Chattopadhyay and Laura Yan, graduate organizers of the Bombay and Indian Ocean Urbanisms workshop, and Ph.D. Candidates in the History Department at Columbia University
Introducing The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies
It has been said so often it is now cliché—“menstruation is having its moment!” But what is this moment actually about? What are we talking about when we talk about menstruation?
The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies invites the reader to explore menstruation from nearly every possible angle, including dimensions that you might not yet have considered: the historical, political, embodied, cultural, religious, social, health, economic, artistic, literary and many more. With 72 chapters on more than 1000 pages, the Handbook--the first of its kind--establishes Critical Menstruation Studies as a rich field of research.
The editors, Chris Bobel, Inga Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling, and Tomi-Ann Roberts together bring almost a century of expertise in studying menstruation. Over the last three years, they have sought out 134 contributors in more than 30 countries to address a wide range of menstrual matters in the Handbook.
DEFINING FEATURES:
Timely & Critical Scholarship: The time for this Handbook is now, at a moment when menstrual health moves from margin to center as a subject of urgent concern and enthusiastic exploration. The Handbook fills a crucial gap. It exposes myths, fallacies, and false claims. And while it advances the knowledge of the field, it acknowledges that there is a lot we don’t know yet. It is the critical companion for anyone interested in menstruation.
Deliberate Diversity: The coherence of the Handbook lies in its deliberate diversity—in content, experiences, formats, and authors representing diverse forms of knowledge and expertise. From traditional research chapters to policy and practice notes, menstrual art, personal narratives, and "Transnational Engagements" across cultures and countries, the Handbook seeks to engage a wide range of readers.
Menstruation as a Lens for Gender Justice: The Handbook establishes Critical Menstruation Studies as a robust and multifaceted category of analysis and a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across social, cultural, embodied, and historical dimensions. Through the Handbook we aim to demonstrate the richness of Critical Menstruation Studies, a field that is finally coming into its own.
Across this diverse content, the varied questions asked and answered address menstrual health over the life course from menarche to menopause:
Do you want to understand how menstrual stigma prompts us to conceal any sign of menstruation? Are you curious how stigma limits the understanding of menstruation of young people around the world and can lead to delays in reproductive health diagnosis and care?
Do you want to learn about efforts to improve menstrual education, including for men and boys, through films, apps, and other innovative means?
Have you thought about how culture shapes the experience of menstruation and how menstruators engage with religious practices in diverse ways?
Do you want to read about the first-hand experiences of trans and non-binary persons, menstruators with disabilities, menstruators with autism, migrants and refugees, girls forced into early marriage, or Dalits?
Are you curious about menstrual advocacy efforts--past and present--, the pushback activists face, and their successes, including efforts to include menstruation in national policy, in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and in the context of human rights?
Are you among the millions of users of menstrual tracking apps and want to learn more about the role of technology, social entrepreneurs, and menstrual advertising in shaping our understanding of menstruation?
Do you want to see how menstruation is represented on Twitter, on YouTube, on TV, in films, and in visual art?
Are you interested in the unique challenges menstruators face in diverse settings such as prisons or jails, humanitarian crises and refugee camps, informal settlements, and conditions of homelessness?
The Handbook addresses all these questions and many more. But it doesn’t seek to provide definitive answers. Whether contributors address religious rituals, menstrual leave, or menstrual sex, they defy easy answers and avoid monolithic views. The Handbook invites the reader into the conversation by considering different perspectives and engaging with apparent contradictions and tensions. It aims to stimulate dialogue and further inquiry and to leverage that knowledge to effect meaningful change.
Contributed by the Menstrual Health and Gender Justice workin group
Feminist Curious Steps Through History: Illumination in Dark Times
March 8, International Women’s Day, marks a global moment when feminists walk, chant, sing, and dance together in celebration of the transformative power of solidarity and collective action. In 2020, Istanbul is witnessing a new version of this celebration in the form of a “women’s run” organized by the sports section of the Istanbul Municipality, which recently changed hands into feminist-friendly leadership. Dark times call for creative politics: with feminist marches and other forms of political demonstrations in urban public space being suppressed by the government, women will run on a feminist path! And, much to our delight, the path of this women’s run has partially been inspired by the Curious Steps: Gender and Memory Walks of Istanbul.
Curious Steps in Kadıköy (photo courtesy of Murat Germen)
Feminists inspire each other! A group of us took our first steps toward designing Istanbul’s first feminist memory walk as part of our preparation for the Women Mobilizing Memory working group meeting in September 2014. Inspired by the feminist tour of Budapest (organized by the historian Andrea Petö of Central European University); the feminist walk of Bochum (hosted by Linda Unger of the feminist archive collective ausZeiten); and the informal memory walk that Soledad Falabella offered the Women Mobilizing Memory group in Santiago, Chile, in 2013, a group of us at SU Gender (Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence) came together to imagine what it would mean to walk the streets of Istanbul with feminist curious steps. Another source of inspiration was the Militourism festival (2004–2006), organized by an antimilitarist group of conscientious objectors (including women objectors), drawing attention to the “militarist” sites of Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir with creative “antimilitarist” performances. With decades of feminist scholarship on women’s history writing and the amazing (online) Women’s Museum Istanbul, which brought to light the complex intersectional layers of Istanbul’s gendered history, we felt well equipped to take our first steps in exploring the possibilities of feminist and queer re-rootings in our beloved city. At a time when we felt “uprooted,” with bombs exploding and the democratic space shrinking, exploring our feminist and queer roots as resources of inspiration and empowerment, and doing so through collective walking and storytelling, felt healing and transformative.
Ebrar Nefes telling the story of Afife Jale in Kadıköy (photo courtesy of Murat Germen)
In our contribution to the volume Women Mobilizing Memory, my coauthors, Bürge Abiral, Dilara Çalışkan, and Armanc Yıldız, and I argue that a feminist city walk offers the possibility to engage in “situated feminist storytelling” for mobilizing silenced memories, on the one hand, and making visible creative mobilizations of memory, on the other. Currently organized in three Istanbul neighborhoods, Curious Steps brings together diverse groups of people for collective walks through streets and sites that come to new life with hidden women’s and LGBTI+ stories, unmarked on site but researched and creatively told by young volunteers. As such, the walks enact what Cynthia Enloe calls “feminist curiosity” in urban space with an ever-growing and ever-changing repertoire of stories that merge public and intimate archives.
Selen Bayhan telling the story of Kınar Sıvacıyan (photo courtesy of Murat Germen)
After five years of walking in small groups, it is very exciting that we will soon be running with thousands of women to collectively witness some of these sites and stories of struggle along the path of the March 8 women’s run in the Asian neighborhood of Kadıköy. Right where the Kadıköy Women’s Run will start this March 8, we have our first Curious Steps stop in front of the State Conservatory, marking the outstanding legacy of artist Mermaid Eftalya (Atanasia Yeorgiadu, 1891–1939) who sang fifty-six of the one hundred recordings of the State Conservatory published by Columbia Records in 1927, without a single one mentioning her (Greek) name. On the other side of the State Conservatory, by the City Theater, we stop again to remember Kınar Sıvacıyan (1876–1950), one of the leading theater artists of the late-Ottoman and early-Republican period, who performed in numerous plays in the Darülbedayi (the precursor of the State Theaters) and other theaters across Istanbul. Despite her fame in the 1910s and 1920s, the Armenian actor Kınar Sıvacıyan has since been written out of all historical records, including theater history texts, while her Muslim contemporaries, such as Muhsin Ertuğrul and, later, Afife Jale, are remembered through theaters and awards named after them.
Curious Steps in Kadıköy, January 2016 (hearing Kınar Sıvacıyan’s story with a play on Afife Jale in the background)
Along the route of the Women’s Run another stop marks the Rexx Cinema, which used to house one of the oldest theaters in Kadıköy, the Apollon. This is where Afife Jale, the first Muslim woman actor to take public stage, performed her first plays. As we stop to talk about Afife Jale’s breaking all gender norms with her passion for theater and performance and facing serious challenges from her own family and the police, we also explore the intersectional layers of her struggle. In our narration, the story of Kınar Sıvacıyan’s helping Afife escape from the police, who regularly raided the theater upon receiving complaints that a Muslim woman was on stage, is a story of women’s solidarity in the background of ethnicized, patriarchal nationalism.
Another site of feminist and queer solidarity along the run is Yoğurtçu Park. Here, our Curious Steps stories focus on the significance of the park for feminist and LGBTI+ histories of activism, focusing particularly on the first march against domestic violence in 1987, after which the first women’s shelters were established, and the ongoing weekly Yoğurtçu Women’s Forum, a vibrant site of feminist debate and exchange since the Gezi protests of 2013.
Curious Steps at Yoğurtçu Park (photo courtesy of Murat Germen)
“Even in the darkest of times,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “we have the right to expect some illumination.” These are certainly dark times for Turkey, and the planet at large. Yet it is also a time in which we are witnessing new forms of creative, life-enhancing, transformative politics everywhere. From Black Lives Matter, which has shaken up the “normalcy” of white privilege and supremacy through an intersectional lens rooted in feminist and queer politics, to the global #metoo movement that is challenging the systematic workings of masculinist privilege and from the mass demonstrations of women in India cutting across religious, ethnic and caste lines to the viral Las Tesis movement against sexual violence and impunity initiated by women in Chile, we are facing a time of revolutionary reimaginings of gender and sexuality everywhere. The Kadıköy Women’s Run is only one among many March 8 activities planned in Istanbul this year, but a particularly inspiring one in the connections it is establishing with the city’s rich history of feminist activism. When feminist activism meets imaginative memory politics, new histories are made! And, as the Women Mobilizing Memory volume shows with many inspiring examples, they are being made everywhere.
As we walk, dance and run this March 8 in Istanbul, it’s heartening to know that millions across the globe will be coming together on International Women’s Day, and throughout Women’s History Month, illuminating these dark times with feminist activism and wisdom.
Annual Feminist Night March in Taksim, 2019.(photo courtesy of Çiğdem Üçüncü/NarPhotos)
Contributed by Ayşe Gül Altınay*, Women Mobilizing Memory working group
* Ayşe Gül Altınay is professor of anthropology at Sabancı University, former director of SU Gender (Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence), and coeditor (with Maria Jose Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon) of Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). The book, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. It emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists.
Note: This blog post was written before the killing of at least 36 Turkish soldiers in a massive attack near Idlib, Syria on February 28, and Turkey opening its borders soon after to allow refugees and migrants to pass, which has created a devastating humanitarian crisis at the borders and the Aegean Sea with Greek and Bulgarian authorities not allowing passage and suspending asylum applications. After the recent announcement from the Governorship of Istanbul that all political actions and demonstrations “against war” are banned until March 10th, it is not clear which March 8 activities will take place, and how they will be received by the security forces.
Shirley Sun: "Should We Be Worried About Racialization of Precision Medicine?"
Dr. Shirley Sun, Associate Professor of Sociology with joint courtesy appointments at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine and the School of Biological Sciences at NTU gave a presentation on December 4, 2019 hosted by the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture working group on the racialization of precision medicine.
In her talk titled “Should you be worried about racialization of precision medicine? Insights from Asia and North America,” Dr. Sun gave an overview of her comparative analysis of provider perspectives on the categorization of genomics data based on race in Singapore, Canada, and the United States.
Her qualitative interviews with healthcare providers reveal the contentions and dilemmas that racialized precision medicine creates for practitioners; on the one hand providers understand that genomic data categorized by race and ethnicity is inherently faulty, and that it is at best a proxy for health behaviors. One provider called this the “poor man’s” genetic testing. On the other hand, data is delivered to these providers in a racialized format and these providers are then tasked to utilize this data to make healthcare decisions for their patients. Data categorized along ethnic and racial lines also provide useful shorthand devices to help patients understand their disease probability.
Dr. Sun warns that racialized findings of precision medicine may be especially challenging for populations that do not have access to resources. Inability to pay for cutting edge therapies or healthcare resources necessary to address disease disparities revealed by precision medicine may contribute to further health inequality among already vulnerable populations that are more likely to be ethnic and racial minority groups. Concerns from providers about patient access to resources were observed in all three sites, despite that healthcare is nationalized in Canada, for example.
The presentation concluded by opening up to questions from the audience. Among other topics, questions regarding the impact of anti-discrimination laws and the importance of provider self-identified demographics (race, ethnicity, gender) emerged. Interestingly, according to Dr. Sun, providers first and foremost identified themselves as healthcare providers before identifying with any race or ethnicity during these interviews. Second, the discussion also opened up to the concern about patients’ access to costly and rare therapies necessary to treat their genetic disorders. Physicians would anecdotally tell stories of patients who had succumbed to such high expenses that they sold their homes and other possessions to pay for treatments. This personal narrative drove home how precision medicine diagnostic abilities were more advanced than treatments, as treatments were rare and prohibitively expensive across both nationalized and privatized healthcare systems.
Approaches to Racial and Ethnic Genomic Variance
Given the importance of race and ethnicity to health in racialized societies like the United States, we see disparate approaches to how genomics are discussed in research. Seeing cancer morbidity and mortality differences among ethnoracial groups as a starting point, Peter O’Donnel and Eileen Dolan (2009) of the University of Chicago suggest “cancer pharmacoethnicity” may be a useful approach. Cancer pharmacoethnicity, according to O’Donnel and Dolan, could hold the potential to be predictive of individual drug responses based on the race or ethnic group these individuals identify with. In contrast, Nancy Krieger and colleagues (2017) of Harvard’s School of Public Health analyzed the racial disparities in estrogen-receptor negative breast cancer among Black and White American women through a socio-political lens. In this report, Krieger’s team demonstrates that it is necessary to look at race as a historically situated category that changes through time. Krieger, Jahn and Waterman illustrate how the high incidence of estrogen-receptor-negative breast cancer among Black women compared to White women can be linked to being born under the legalized discrimination of Jim Crow laws. Black women living in states that enforced Jim Crow segregation had a higher odds ratio of estrogen-receptor negative breast cancer, while White women did not show this trend. The highest incidence of this type of breast cancer was evident for Black women born before 1965. This historically situated approach highlights how racialized biologies result from social processes independent of fundamental biological differences.
Krieger, Jahn and Waterman validate a framework that examines racial disparities at the molecular level in a way that foregrounds history and social processes of racialization, and avoids suggesting that observed differences emerge from “fundamental” difference in racial biologies or genotypes.
Socially Situated Genomic Differences
Sociopolitical context is also important from a global perspective. In Cooper et al.’s article (2005) titled “An international comparative study of blood pressure in populations of European vs. African descent,” sociocultural and political impacts on health trends were again highlighted. While in the United States cardiovascular disease is indisputably a more prominent health problem among Blacks, Cooper and colleagues establish that this does not have to do with African Ancestry; in fact, Germanic populations had a higher high blood pressure incidence than any population included in their world-wide study. Through their analysis, the authors bring to the foreground the effects of place and social standing to population-level health in contrast to other research that frame disease as germane to the individuals that make up racial and ethnic populations.
Troy Duster (2003) brings the discussion in focus through his description of the divergent approaches to population-level genomic disease risk. In his comparison of responses to Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia genetic screening, Duster emphasizes how genomic disease risk is not simply about the disease, but also about the population it affects and the policy responses enacted. Duster describes how Tay-Sachs is a rapid-onset generative genetic disorder that is dormant in the first year and a half of a child’s life, but ultimately claims the lives of young children before the age of four. Tay-Sachs disproportionately affected Ashkenazi Jews with 22 of 30 infants born with Tay-Sachs being Ashkenazi during the 1970s (2003: 45). A community based screening program was initiated in response during this time and had the support of doctors, rabbis, and Jewish community leaders alike. This led to the great success of Tay-Sachs screening, with over 310,000 Jews screened voluntarily by 1980 for the genetic disorder. Contrastingly, sickle cell anemia screening was a “public policy disaster” and “health and medical failure” (2003: 47). Although Tay-Sachs is much deadlier, sickle cell anemia screening became mandatory. There was distrust among African Americans towards the White medical providers that came to their communities to conduct genetic screening for sickle cell. Overwhelmingly, African American communities resisted these publically funded screening efforts. Ultimately, the Black Panthers became involved in community based screening efforts, but over-reported their findings of sickle cell anemia (due to the miss-categorization of carriers of the genetic disorder who would go on to live healthy lives) and the tension and hostility between mandated screeners, the screened, and communities only intensified. Regulatory laws for the screening of sickle cell anemia were therefore contentious and medical mistrust deepened.
Overall, the contrast between the social and political response to Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia highlight the importance of the types of communities a genetic disorder affects, the policy response, and the baseline relationships between healthcare providers and the communities affected.
Discussion: The Lasting Presence of Racial and Ethnic Categorization
In our discussion, a PMEPC fellow raised the issue of the significance of racialized categorization as described in Rosenberg et al.’s (2002) article and in philosopher Quayshawn Spencer’s article titled “A Racial Classification for Medical Genetics” (2018). The fellow emphasized how these two works provided evidence about the concordance between racial self-identification and genomic data organized by regional ancestry. This brought up the following questions: Are these socially defined population categorizations more than proxies of health behaviors and disease probability? Are racial categories substantiated in our genes?
Upon a closer read of Rosenberg et al.’s article, the authors delineate how “self-reported ancestry can facilitate assessments of epidemiological risks but does not obviate the need to use genetic information in genetic association studies” (emphasis added; p.2381). The data analyzed in that study was collected from the HGDP-CEPH Human Genome Diversity Cell Line Panel, which is “a resource of 1063 lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) from 1050 individuals in 52 world populations.” One of the major links observed by Rosenberg and colleagues was among populations who shared a language, however “linguistic similarity did not provide a general explanation for genetic groupings of populations that were relatively distant geographically” (p.2384). While Rosenberg et al. point to the use of self-reported population ancestry as a “suitable proxy” for genetic ancestry, they note that an exception to this are recently admixed groups “in which ancestry varies substantially among individuals” (p.2384).
Lastly, in his testing of philosophical premises for the use of racialized categories in genomic medicine, Spencer (2018) notes a scholarly work that claims that self-identified population samples had between 98.8% and 100% membership in the respective continental categories of “Asian,” “Black,” and “White” (p. 1020). Spencer goes on to describe how these numerical representations of self-identification with genomic population concordance do not accurately represent the relationship between these two concepts: the sample population for this particular study was of 3,224 “American” and “Taiwanese” adults and researchers deliberately excluded the “Asian” self reports from their South Asian subjects (Spencer 2018; 1020-1). Therefore, it is important to clarify in all scholarly works that although there may be links between self-identification and genomic variability, genomic data can be curated and presented in a manner that only tell one part of the larger story of disease risk probability for specific ethnic and racial populations.
As Dr. Sun highlighted during the discussion session, precision medicine is a misnomer. In fact, precision medicine could be best described as disease risk probability medicine where, based on available data genetic data (however categorized), healthcare professionals can provide disease risk probability information to individuals. As national data emerge regarding the variability of population genetics and health disease markers, perhaps a silver lining lies in that that the social determinants of health will be identified (as seen in Cooper (2005), Duster (2003), Krieger (2017) and Sun (2017)) and their effects upon populations attenuated.
Contributed by Sonia Mendoza-Grey
Do Menstrual Health and Hygiene Policies Matter? – A Human Rights Assessment
In November 2019, Kenya adopted the world’s first stand-alone policy on menstrual hygiene. India has been integrating menstrual hygiene efforts in its sanitation policies for more than 10 years. And in the United States, we are counting down the States that still tax menstrual products. – These are just some of the policy developments in the menstrual health space.
Over the next year, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights will conduct a review of policies on menstrual hygiene and health policy in India, Kenya, Senegal, and the United States. Purvaja S. Kavattur, the project researcher explains: “We are excited to work alongside in-country stakeholders to learn from their expertise and compile lessons learned to address the marginalization of menstruating bodies. We hope to explore what’s happening in terms of policy development and who benefits: Do policies matter for the lives of menstruating individuals? And do they matter for all people?”
Over the past ten years, there have been significant developments in the nascent field of menstrual health. Increasingly, countries are adopting legislative and policy frameworks on menstrual hygiene and health. Policies cover different aspects such as menstrual hygiene, de-taxing menstrual products, or ensuring provision of menstrual products to specific population groups. South Asia and Eastern Africa house two hubs for menstrual health policy action and our selected countries are at the forefront of these developments. It is, therefore, an opportune time to reflect on recent policy developments.
However, amidst growing momentum, there are risks of adopting policies that are narrow in scope and that focus on hygiene needs, infrastructure and access to products. Menstrual health also affects education, economic security, empowerment, and self-confidence. As such, there is a need for a more comprehensive understanding of menstrual health as it is shaped by menstrual stigma, healthcare access, educational attainment, as well as civic and public life, which should be addressed through policies. A more comprehensive approach that examines the social determinants of menstrual health is needed to better identify causes of marginalization, substantive foci beyond menstrual hygiene, and the subsequent policy gaps.
Inga Winkler, the project’s PI and director of CSSD working group Menstrual Health and Gender Justice, explains: “We are at a critical point. We want to move along with this momentum and continue building off the work already happening on the ground. But in doing so we want to ensure that policy developments in this emerging field are grounded in human rights principles of non-discrimination and equality, participation, and accountability. We hope to identify what levers forward policies grounded in human rights considerations to alleviate the marginalization of menstruating bodies.”
Through this review, we seek to explore whose voices, interests and needs are centered and whose are marginalized in these policies and the processes leading to their adoption, and how this influences the framing of policies both in terms of their scope and the targeted populations. We will, therefore, conduct a process-oriented review informed by human rights principles as well as substantive human rights guarantees in the four countries.
The project is funded through a grant from the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, which has been active in supporting governments in developing policies and programs on menstrual hygiene for years.
We hope that in conducting this review, we will uncover ways policies normalize and destigmatize menstruation, shape budget allocations and service provision, and create mechanisms for accountability. We hope that our review will highlight areas of success, areas of improvements, and gaps to help create a roadmap for other governments looking into expanding their menstrual health and hygiene policies.
Contributed by Purvaja S. Kavattur, Menstrual Heath and Gender Justice working group Staff Associate
January 21, 2020
Women Mobilizing Memory in Harlem
In September 2014, vendors hawked mussels and shoppers slipped into H&M while Women Mobilizing Memory moved with a different purpose through Istanbul’s Istiklal Street. Our CSSD working group was embarking on a “gendered memory walk,” an activist-scholar intervention coined by our counterparts in Turkey. Ayşe Gül Altınay, anthropology professor and Director of SU Gender at Sabancı University, and several graduate fellows, including Bürge Abiral, Armanc Yildiz, and Dilara Çalışkan, organized the walk as part of the Curious Steps Program. Their goal was to highlight memory sites central to political movements towards feminist and queer liberation that risked being subsumed in history and the changing face of the city.
They led us through the bustling foot traffic on Istiklal and up steep medieval side streets to recognize landmarks we would have missed otherwise. Contemplating the ghosts behind these sites of social change, we beheld spaces like an independent bookstore known for selling radical literature and an LGBTQI organization persisting in human rights work despite being virtually illegal under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime. In the essay titled “Curious Steps: Mobilizing Memory through Collective Walking and Storytelling in Istanbul” in our new anthology, Women Mobilizing Memory, our counterparts scrutinize their conception of this public humanities project in their own words.
As we prepared to bring these colleagues from Chile and Turkey to New York for the first time in 2015, the gendered memory walk in Istanbul stood out as one of the most inspiring events we had shared. The walk not only brought us together to bear witness to marginalized histories at risk for cultural amnesia; it also democratized academic knowledge as an activity that could be simultaneously interesting and freely available to the public sphere.
When we decided to stage our own walk in New York, we navigated some difficult questions. Whose history was most threatened by erasure in New York City? To what extent did we, as a group of highly educated, middle-class and predominantly white activist-scholars, have the right to represent that history? And which neighborhood was best positioned to address these questions?
Because our transnational peers had rooted their public interventions in critiques of the collective traumas that most deeply affected their nation’s histories, we aimed to do the same. Although the 9/11 terrorist attack is the trauma most readily associated with New York, we felt a more persistent and insidious history deserved a spotlight: the founding of America in the transatlantic slave trade, and the long history of racial animus that has instigated wide-ranging injustices from police brutality to gentrification in the present.
In this light, Harlem emerged as an important choice for many reasons— not the least of which was our own university’s ongoing colonization of one of the most famous Black neighborhoods in the U.S. Historically, Harlem has also been a contested zone for cross-cultural contact, influenced by an exceptionally wide range of competing desires, claims, and identities. Before gaining its international reputation as “Black Mecca,” Harlem was an entertainment epicenter where many performers were Black at venues that only served whites. An emphasis on entertainment also made the area a vibrant hub for queer nightlife in an era when homosexuality was strictly policed. The “Harlem Renaissance” started with the Renaissance Theater, also known as the Rennie, where Black patrons were allowed access for the first time; as time wore on, this theater hosted not only films and plays but also sports events and grassroots political meetings.
Collaboration in Harlem was historically intersectional, too. Women of color helped each other across social classes at Utopia Children’s House. White and Black book collectors desegregated libraries starting with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Artists across the sexual identity spectrum, like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, threw rent parties to keep each other solvent at community living spaces like 267 House. Thus the neighborhood was a vital center of intellectual, cultural and artistic creativity in New York City long before becoming stigmatized for criminal activity through the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Our team of graduate students from Columbia University and New York University, including Henry Castillo, Andrea Crow, Alyssa Greene, Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, Leticia Robles-Moreno, and myself, spearheaded the project. We strove to juxtapose well-known landmarks like the Apollo Theater alongside long-ago demolished businesses, like the row of queer-friendly bars that once occupied the block where a massive luxury condominium complex now stands. We also connected the stories of spaces on our route to broader national crises surrounding race relations, like the accelerating rise of white supremacy and white nationalism, the ongoing problem of police brutality disproportionately affecting Black men and transwomen of color, and the pervasiveness of gentrification pushing lifelong residents out of their homes.
We are thrilled to re-release the Harlem Memory Walk as an independent digital experience in anticipation of the debut of Women Mobilizing Memory. The walk is now available to anyone in the public sphere via PocketSights, a free mobile app on Apple and Android. Download the app, and search for the walk (if it doesn’t appear automatically) by searching for Columbia’s zipcode (10025 or 10027). For those who do not have smartphones, an updated version of the walk can also be accessed via Google Docs. We hope you will share the memory walk widely and thank you in advance for joining us on our journey.
Submitted by Nicole Marie, Gervasio, Ph.D.
August 30, 2019
On the Frontlines: A Student's Reflections on Ebola Crisis Oral History Research Trip to Sierra Leone and Liberia
I had the privilege of joining the Center for the Study of Social Difference working group, On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics on a week long trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone and Monrovia, Liberia in August of 2019. While there, we recorded oral histories of nurses and midwives who were active during the Ebola crisis that afflicted both Sierra Leone and Liberia between 2014 and 2016. These interviews recorded perspectives from nurses working at the level of ministries of health, to those engaged on the front-lines. Nurses interviewed included some who treated the earliest cases, and others who were there as the last patients were discharged from the Ebola treatment centers. Two of the nurses interviewed were themselves survivors of Ebola and everyone the project encountered had a personal story of loss from that time.
This trip marked my first foray into the field of global health work. My responsibilities mainly revolved around handling the logistics of recording the interviews, taking photos of the participants, and ensuring that the group could function efficiently over the course of a very short trip. In the process, I was able to sit with and listen to the stories of those who came to give their testimonies. We interviewed almost 40 nurses and midwives and met many other everyday heroes who told us their stories about Ebola. As someone in the process of applying to medical school, this trip gave me a new perspective on the role of nurses, why they have so often been sidelined in the decision-making process, and the remarkable lengths to which they go daily to serve their patients.
The interviews of nurses were conducted exclusively by nurses. Our delegation included two professors from Columbia University, Dr. Jennifer Dohrn of the School of Nursing and Dr. Susan Michaels-Strasser of the School of Public Health. They were joined by two other leaders in the fields of nursing and midwifery, Dr. Annette Mwansa Nkowane, formerly WHO Headquarters Technical Advisor for Nursing and Midwifery in the Department for Human Resources for Health, and Dr. Margaret Phiri, formerly WHO AFRO Nursing Technical Advisor and Maternal Health Advisor for the WHO in Sierra Leone.
Prior to departure, we participated in an oral history training session with Professor Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. Professor Clark went over the fundamental principles of the life story approach to oral history. She also led our group in developing a set of areas of inquiry to guide us in the field.
Getting to Sierra Leone is not a simple endeavor. Freetown was founded by formerly enslaved people from the United States, with a group of British abolitionists, on a protected and mountainous peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. With no flat land on which to build an airport closer to the city, visitors must fly into Lungi on the mainland and take a ferry across the mouth of Tagrin Bay. We rode across the bay on the bow of a small ferry. Bouncing in the waves, happy to be out of a plane after so many hours, that little jaunt foreshadowed a week of adventure.
Upon arrival our delegation was welcomed by the project’s local leader Dr. Joan Shepherd, who walked us through our schedule for the coming days. Dr. Shepherd is the Principal of the National School of Midwifery and was a tremendous resource. She identified all of the nurses and midwives to be interviewed and led the delegation to meet with local leaders. We were all extremely grateful for the assistance of Dolphine Buoga and the rest of the ICAP Sierra Leone team who hosted the project in their facility.
Eid al-Adha fell on Monday August 12th in Sierra Leone. As a result, the ICAP offices were closed for regular business, leaving plenty of space for the interviews. It was the rainy season and the sound of intermittent downpours can be heard in the background of nearly every recording.
Fonti Kargbo, an Ebola survivor and advocate, was interviewed on that first morning. Fonti spoke about the death of his wife Hawa Kamara, also a nurse, who contracted the virus after being directed to wash the body of a recently deceased patient. Fonti wore a shirt printed with the names and faces of all of the healthcare workers who died as a result of contact with that single patient.
The second day of interviews included Josephine Sellu, a nurse who had worked alongside the late Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, who led the country’s early efforts against Ebola and lost his life to the disease. Josephine was profiled in a front-page story in the New York Times on August 23rd, 2014. She was quoted in that story as saying, “You have no options. You have to go and save others. You are seeing your colleagues dying, and you still go and work.” Josephine’s story has remained central to Professor Dohrn’s class on the subject, but until this trip the two nurses had never met.
The afternoon of August 13th included a meeting at the office of the Chief Nursing Officer, Mary Fullah, who had been interviewed the day before. The meeting was an opportunity to introduce the team, explain the purpose of the project and to get feedback and input. That meeting included Senesie Margao, also interviewed by the project, who was the president of the Sierra Leone Nurses Association during the Ebola crisis.
Later that afternoon, we toured the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital where a model ward is supported by ICAP. The hospital is adjacent to Magazine Wharf, a neighborhood which was one of the hotbeds of Ebola.
Before leaving Sierra Leone, on our final morning in that country, Hassinatu Kanu Karoma, the former Chief Nursing Officer, who was in that role during Ebola, sat for an interview. She had featured prominently in many of the stories told in the preceding days and collecting her own story was an important step towards understanding the experiences of nurses during that time.
Upon arrival in Monrovia, Liberia, we were warmly welcomed by the Liberian Board for Nursing and Midwifery. The board’s offices contain space for the staff of a number of local organizations and associations, all related to nursing and midwifery. Our group is indebted to the staff of the board and its leader, Cecelia Kpangbala, for their hospitality and critical assistance in bringing together a diverse group of nurses and midwives to be interviewed. As Cecelia was unfortunately unable to participate due to a scheduling conflict, Darboi Korkoyah led the team during the visit.
Stepping through the board’s front door, visitors are immediately confronted by a powerful sight: on a simple bulletin board, an informal memorial to 32 nurses who died battling Ebola.
After a brief introduction, Darboi escorted us to meet with Liberia’s Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer, Tarloh Quiwonkpa and her deputy Diana Sarteh who would be interviewed the following day. Quiwonkpa, who was trained in the US after leaving Liberia as a child with her family and seeking refuge in the US, oversees 400 clinics and hospitals across the country.
In addition to interviewing Darboi, the project was introduced to the leadership of the Liberian Nurses Association and the Liberian Midwifery Association. In each case, oral histories were also collected.
Among the front-line nurses interviewed in Liberia was Marthalyne Freeman. Marthalyne’s story is an incredible one because it includes her care of her own daughter, now a survivor, in an Ebola treatment center. What struck the team about this interview was the inclusion of a simple question from Marthalyne herself. She asked, “Why has it taken five years to do this?” Like so many of the nurses interviewed, she knew that her story needed to be recorded and shared, and that nurses and midwives must be given the recognition for the sacrifices and valor they demonstrated.
On the last day in Liberia, one of the nurses interviewed, James Harries, came to the board’s offices after having worked a 48 hour shift. Instead of going home to sleep, he came to tell his story. His and every other interview showcased the hunger that still exists in these healthcare workers to be heard, acknowledged, and respected.
In Liberia, we encountered stories of nurses who worked through the entire Ebola crisis without being compensated and others who were cast out by their families and forced to sleep in the hospital for a year. The interviews recorded in great detail the complicated precautionary decontamination rituals nurses found necessary to ensure their family’s safety from becoming infected with the Ebola virus when they came home at night, if they did come home at all.
Finally, before the trip came to a close, the stories of Dr. Phiri and Dr. Mwansa were collected. These two nursing leaders, active themselves during the crisis at the level of international policy, offered their own synthesis of the stories collected, lessons learned and the necessary next steps which must be taken to prevent future disasters.
The On the Frontlines working group is grateful to the Center for the Study of Social Difference’s support. This fall, we will begin the analysis of the interviews collected during this incredible trip in earnest.
This trip pulled back the lid on a valuable, and largely untapped resource: the collective wisdom of nurses and midwives who have served with dignity and perseverance despite the lack of any recognition or equitable compensation. I was deeply moved by the sacrifices of these healthcare workers and hope to be able to honor them through our project over the coming year.
Contributed by Jeremy Orloff, Premedical Post Baccalaureate Student, General Studies, Columbia University and On the Frontlines working group Coordinator
Statement of Support for Ayse Gül Altinay from the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference and Women Creating Change
Our colleague Ayse Gül Altinay, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Center at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, was sentenced to 25 months in prison earlier this week. She is one of over 2200 Academics for Peace who three years ago signed a statement “We will not be a party to this crime” appealing for an end to violent state-sponsored persecution of Kurdish citizens of Turkey. The investigation in Istanbul has covered only the first 1200 signatories so far, but it might be extended to the second 1000 as well. In this, her fourth, judicial hearing, Altinay was charged with “willingly and knowingly supporting a terrorist organization as a non-member.” The court's charge and thus the sentencing have no merit.
Ayse Gül Altinay has been a Faculty Fellow of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference since 2013. She is a co-organizer of the Working Group on “Women Mobilizing Memory” and a co-editor of the forthcoming Women Mobilizing Memory volume (Columbia University Press, 2019). Last September, she was also an invited speaker at the Center’s tenth anniversary conference “What We Can Do When There’s Nothing To be Done.” Her collaborative project “Curious Steps”— a gender-memory walk through Istanbul – spurred other such memory walks in additional sites including Harlem. Ayse Gül Altinay’s contributions to the Center’s work have been immeasurable: her feminist commitment to nonviolent protest and to transformative activism; her sharp insights into the workings of power and militarism and her determination to fight them; her fierce hopefulness combined with personal kindness, warmth and radiance have been an inspiration to all of us fortunate to be working with her.
In the spirit of collaboration and solidarity that Ayse Gül Altinay represents, it is important to point out that she is not alone in this struggle. Hers is one of a large number of cases receiving 25-month sentences that cannot be commuted. These cases, hers included, are in the process of being appealed. Some shorter sentences have been commuted, and many other colleagues are awaiting court dates over the next months. This is the time to speak out forcefully on all of their behalf and on behalf of freedom of expression and academic freedom.
On May 21st, 2019, Ayse Gül Altinay made the following statement to the court:
Every individual, every family living in this geography has suffered from past wars, migrations and experiences of violence. In terms of the cycle of violence that trauma studies alerts us to, we live in a challenging, vulnerable geography.
Yet, what we make of these past experiences of pain is up to us...
Are we going to turn our pain into more violence, hate, pain and injustice, or into steps that multiply life, beauty, love, peace and justice?
This is the main question that shapes my work and my life.
I firmly believe that we all have new steps we can take towards healing the traumas that have been transmitted from one generation to the other, and to break out of the cycles of violence that we are living through.
We, at CSSD and Columbia Global Freedom of Expression stand in solidarity and admiration for Ayse Gül Altinay and all of our academic colleagues who are being persecuted for their courage to speak out against violent aggression. The injustice of these sentences cannot be tolerated.
Disrupting Money: Puerto Rican Community Currency Project Makes Its Way to New York for the 2019 Loisaida Festival
Following a successful launch earlier this year, Puerto Rican artists will begin circulating Puerto Rican ‘pesos’ at the Lower Manhattan Festival ahead of one-month residency in the city.
NEW YORK, NY - On May 26, Valor y Cambio, an interactive community currency project that seeks to challenge austerity policies in Puerto Rico and beyond, will have its New York City premiere at the 2019 Loisaida Festival, followed by a one-month residency that will include collaborations with local businesses and other venues. The project is part of Pasado y Presente: Art After the Young Lords 1969-2019, an exhibition produced by Loisaida Inc. in partnership with Nathan Cummings Foundation, that will open on May 31.
At the core of Valor y Cambio (#ValorYCambio) is a community currency, the peso of Puerto Rico, inspired by Puerto Rican figures recognized both locally and internationally for their contributions to social justice. Building on the research of Unpayable Debt, a working group at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference, artists Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Sarabel Santos Negrón first launched the project in Puerto Rico in February 2019. The pesos were available at partner businesses and organizations, through an ATM machine, which dispensed the bills in return for participants recording a short video about what they value. Over a thousand people shared their thoughts and stories during the project’s first week.
By combining art, storytelling, and solidarity economy principles, Valor y Cambio started a broad conversation about what is a just economy and how to foster collective empowerment in the face of austerity policies. “Through engaging with local communities and businesses that are willing to use the currency for a specific period of time, the project provides "an experience about how the economy can better respond to the needs of most people,” explains Frances Negrón- Muntaner. “It also allows participants to create a different conception of wealth based not on extraction and profit, but full access to education, environmental protection, and racial and gender equity, among other fundamentals."
Community currencies are increasingly used around the world to value the skills, stories, and talents of communities with limited access to the official currency. These currencies do not substitute the official one, but they enable communities to exchange work, time, and resources to meet their needs. There are thousands of community currencies circulating in the world, including in the United States.
The Puerto Rican peso has six denominations, each featuring a figure or community selected for their commitment to the project’s four core values: solidarity, equity, justice, and creativity. They are: the siblings Gregoria, Celestina, and Rafael Cordero, pioneers of Puerto Rico’s modern public education system; the abolitionist physician Ramón Emeterio Betances; feminist and labor organizer Luisa Capetillo; poet Julia de Burgos; human rights advocate and MLB Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente; and the eight communities of the Martín Peña channel in San Juan.
"Each bill tells a story and invites a conversation about the contributions that these figures and communities made toward a more equitable world, and what is needed to continue the work that they started,” says Negrón-Muntaner.
While Valor y Cambio emerged in response to Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis, many of the economic challenges facing Puerto Ricans there have been, and continue to be, present in the Puerto Rican diaspora and other New York communities. Moreover, mass migration itself is a result of economic and political crisis. Not surprisingly, all of the iconic figures that appear on the Puerto Rican pesos experienced the impact of forced migrations in their lifetimes, and several, such as Betances, de Burgos and Capetillo, share a deep connection to New York City.
Valor y Cambio will be present at the 2019 Loisaida Festival, which each year celebrates the diasporic heritage of this historic Puerto Rican neighborhood characterized by a strong sense of community pride, creativity, and innovative resilience. The Puerto Rican pesos will be available through a refurbished ATM called VyC, for Valor y Cambio. "Participants just have to record their responses about what they value. The machine records the video and offers the pesos, which businesses will accept in exchange for some items,” explains Santos Negrón. These recordings will be part of a documentary about the project.
"In both Puerto Rico and New York, many assume that the talents of people without access to dollars have no economic, cultural, or social value. Our project questions that idea and suggests that crisis moments offer an opportunity to rethink an unjust economic system, and to explore creative community-centered initiatives,” concludes Negrón-Muntaner.
For details about the historical figures featured on the bills and more information on social currencies around the world, visit www.valorycambio.org.
To take part in Valor y Cambio NYC, visit the Loisaida Festival and seek participating businesses and organizations that will accept pesos. These include:
Booths at the Loisaida Center, on May 26.
City-wide, from May 26 to June 30
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About the Artists
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a filmmaker, writer, curator and a professor at Columbia University (New York), where she founded the Latino Arts and Activism Archive. Some of her publications are: Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism in Native Nations and Latin America (2017). Some of her films: Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994), Small City, Big Change (2013), and War for Guam (2015). She has been recognized as a scholar and filmmaker with fellowships by Ford, Truman, Rockefeller and Pew foundations. She is also the recipient of the Lenfest Award, one of Columbia University's most prestigious recognitions for excellence in teaching and scholarship (2012), an inaugural OZY Educator Award (2017), and the Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award, presented by the Latin American Studies Association (2019). She currently directs the Media and Idea Lab at Columbia University and co-directs Unpayable Debt, a working group on the global debt crisis, supported by the Center for the Study of Social Difference.
Sarabel Santos Negrón is a multidisciplinary artist, an educator and a professional in museology. Her work focuses on the experience and the memories of nature and landscapes of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. She has curated several projects in the United States and is the current director of the Bayamón Museum of Art in Puerto Rico. Some of her projects: Entre Reinos (2016), Casa Roig, Humacao; Portraits of Nature (2013), Pierced Gallery, New Jersey; and Encuentro (2012), Pontificia Universidad Católica, Ponce. She has also had exhibitions at: Steps Peace Museum, New York; Anytime Department Gallery, Cincinnati; Espacio Tres50, Chiapas, Mexico; Rigss & Leidy Gallery, Maryland; Saatchi Gallery, London; and Arsenal Museum of the Spanish Navy, among other spaces. In 2016, the Maryland Institute College of Art awarded her a merit scholarship for graduate studies.
About Loisaida Inc: Founded in 1978, the mission of Loisaida Inc. is to address the serious economic and social disenfranchisement of Latinx residents while offering multi-generational programming that appeals to the social and cultural sensibilities of the Lower East Side.
About Acacia Network: The Acacia Network, the parent company of Loisaida Inc., is an integrated care organization with offices in New York City, Buffalo and Albany, Orlando and Puerto Rico. It is the 2nd largest Hispanic nonprofit organization in the country. Their mission is realized through three main service delivery systems; Primary Health Care, Behavioral Health Care, and Housing.
#LoisaidaFest2019 #LoisaidaFest #LESHistoryMonth
Loisaidafest.org | Facebook.com/LoisaidaFest | @loisaidafest
Valorycambio.org |Facebook.com/valorycambiopr/
For media inquiries, contact: n.davidpastor@gmail.com or vb2239@columbia.edu