Keywords for Disability Studies Symposium Explores Key Questions for the Future

Disability scholars, artists, activists, and students gathered at the Keywords/Key Questions for Disability Studies Symposium this October to discuss the future of disability studies.

2015 has been a landmark year for disability studies and activism both at Columbia and throughout the United States, as the U.S.’s foundational disability rights legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), turned 25 this July. The anniversary of the ADA, whose legacy is still the subject of much critical debate, coincided with the release of this summer’s Keywords for Disability Studies (NYU Press, 2015), a field-defining collection of essays co-edited by CSSD director Rachel Adams, along with Benjamin Reiss (Emory University) and David Serlin (University of California, San Diego). The fall semester also marked the launch of Columbia’s new University Seminar on Disability, Culture, and Society, following the conclusion of CSSD’s Future of Disability Studies Working Group last spring.

In celebration of these new beginnings and opportunities for reflection, disability scholars, artists, activists, and students gathered at the Keywords/Key Questions for Disability Studies Symposium this October to discuss the next chapter of disability studies. Photos from that meeting are available here.

The two-day symposium began with an artists’ panel on the evening of October 1, where artists Riva Lehrer, Park McArthur, and Sunaura Taylor discussed the key concepts that have informed their artistic practices as people with disabilities. The presentations and Q&A session covered a range of issues including inaccessibility in the art world, representations of people with disabilities in visual art, and the discursive divides between disability scholarship and activism.

Women Mobilizing Memory Member on Democracy Now

Zeynep Gambetti, a member of the CSSD working group Women Mobilizing Memory and participant in the Collaboration and Co-Resistance conference and workshop, appeared on Democracy Now on September 11 to discuss the current series of attacks on Kurdish citizens and HDP party offices in Turkey.

Gambetti's segment begins at 25:00.

Gambetti, Associate Professor, Political Science & International Relations, Boğaziçi University, said that the Erdoğan government has "hijacked legitimate elections" with these reprisals against HDP expansion in the Turkish parliament and the political violence is pushing Turkey toward civil war. Women Mobilizing Memory staged a protest against the anti-Kurd violence at Columbia University the day before Gambetti's appearance.

Watch the discussion here.

Digital Black Atlantic Project Attracts Grants and Honors

The CSSD working group Digital Black Atlantic Project (DBAP) is starting the academic year with an array of honors and awards.

The National Endowment for the Humanities granted DBAP a $29,000 digital start-up grant for the development of the beta version of its peer-reviewed digital publishing platform sx:archipelagos.

Project co-director Kaiama L. Glover was elected a Schomburg Fellow-in-Residence for the development of In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual History, an interactive digital bio-bibliographical map/timeline project that traces and visually represents the circulation of seminal Afro-Atlantic intellectuals and cultural actors – and their ideas – across the 20th century.

Project Co-director David Scott and working group participant Hebe Mattos were awarded a grant from Columbia University’s Global Centers initiative for the further development of their transnational project, Slavery and Repair, an online pedagogical model and scholarly resource for the representation of alternative histories of transatlantic slavery.

Working group participant Kim Hall was awarded a TOW Innovative Pedagogy Award as well as the inaugural faculty partner of the year award for her launch of the Digital Shange Project and development of the digital-based course “The Worlds of Shange.”

Lila Abu-Lughod's "Do Muslim Women Need Saving?" Reviewed in Public Books

Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving? received a favorable review from Leti Volpp in Public Books.

Volpp remarked that Abu-Lughod's book is "a great service to those of us who have long wanted for a resource we can recommend to explain why Muslim women do not need saving" and that it "works hard not to alienate the skeptical reader."

The book provides a multi-faceted examination of the Western obsession with constraint and choice that is borne out of the misplaced imposition of the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and autonomy on Muslim women, according to Volpp.

"The presumption of those who would save Muslim women from their unfreedom is that identification with Islam can only be a negative experience and that they are being saved to a more ideal alternative," writes Volpp.  That Western alternative is usually identified with "human rights, liberal democracy, and modern beauty regimes" even though not all women seek this identical life, according to Volpp's reading of Abu-Lughod.

Abu-Lughod asserts that the subjugated Muslim woman motif can be politically useful to Western states.  She also feels that defining women's rights as human rights assumes the presence of a liberal democracy and in fact acts as a "strategic diversion" for troubled social movements in the global North. Both of these applications leave out the geopolitical and historical realities that forcefully shape Muslim women's lives, writes Volpp.

Read the full review here.

Working Group Helps Produce "An Historic Victory for Women's Equality in Sport"

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) was recently forced to suspend a sporting policy that CSSD project director Rebecca Jordan-Young and her working group, Science and Social Difference, had been contesting for the past three years.

The International Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the onus is on the IAAF to show that naturally high testosterone levels give enough of a performance advantage to warrant the policy; the court did not find the evidence produced by IAAF at the hearing this past spring to be convincing. The IAAF has been given two years to come up with the data to support the policy, or it will be permanently voided.

“Although athletics events are divided into discrete male and female categories, sex in humans is not simply binary,” the court announced in an article in the New York Times.

This ruling does not technically affect the Olympics or other sporting federations (just track and field, governed by IAAF), but it is likely that sports organizations will suspend the policy to avoid additional challenges while they try to gather more data, according to Beck-Young.

The court ruling relied heavily on evidence that Science and Social Difference amassed from sources at Columbia and Barnard and published in Discover, New York Times, BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal), and the American Journal of Bioethics.

Katrina Karkazis, a member of the working group and a bioethicist at Stanford University, told BuzzFeed “It’s a policy that affected all women so [its] suspension is an historic victory for women’s equality in sport.”

CSSD Releases 2014-15 Annual Report

The Center for the Study of Social Difference recently released its annual report for 2014-15. The report announced the successful conclusion of The Future of Disabilities Studies project and the extension of Gender, Religion, and Law in Muslim Societies. Three new projects—Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics; The Legacy of Bandung Humanisms; and The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories—were established.

The report announces that alumni contributed over $200,000 in donations last year and the Digital Black Atlantic Project was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Start-Up Grant for the creation of a digital publishing platform. The Center for the Study of Social Difference Fund, an inaugural quasi-endowment, was established to build ongoing support for CSSD and its projects.

View the annual report here.

WOMEN MOBILIZING MEMORY IV: A Week of Workshops, Exhibits, and Protest

For its fourth international meeting on "Collaboration and Co-Resistance," Women Mobilizing Memory gathered in New York in September. The group, consisting of scholars, artists and activists from Chile, Turkey and the United States, participated in a series of meetings and events that explored how the legacies of violent political histories might offer fodder for a more progressive and hopeful future. Previous meetings took place in Santiago, Montreal, and Istanbul.

At this multidimensional meeting, the forty participants not only commemorated the anniversary of the 1973 Chilean coup and the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, they also issued a solidarity statement and protested Turkish violence against Kurdish minorities. One member provided commentary on the crisis for the nonprofit news program Democracy Now. Click to see photos and video.

The week began with a memory walk through Harlem, visiting both known and forgotten sites of art and protest that revealed the vibrant artistic and intellectual legacies of African American and some Anglo American institutions and individuals in the famous neighborhood.

A group art exhibit at the Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia opened the same afternoon and was followed by an artists’ roundtable. “Collaborative Archives: Connective Histories” included the work of artists based in New York, Istanbul, Berlin, and Santiago. The artworks demonstrated how intimate objects and stories both animate larger painful histories and resist their violent force. For the group, the artworks remained points of reference throughout the week, offering images through which to imagine and reimagine histories of slavery, war, genocide, and political repression. Click to see photos and video.

A second part of the exhibition, a curation of collectively produced posters, “CHILE: 40 Years of Struggle and Resistance,” opened at the Hemispheric Institute on Performance and Politics at New York University at the end of the week. The group also visited the September 11 Memorial Museum, analyzing and critiquing its official hegemonic strategies of memory. Click to see photos.

A public conference, “Women Mobilizing Memory: Collaboration and Co-resistance,” brought working group members together with scholars and activists from Columbia and New York in a series of comparative roundtables on women's strategies of political protest; on memory sites in Santiago, Istanbul and New York; and on the intimate archives of political violence.  The discussions were enlivened by the interdisciplinary approach of the commentators and the focus on action, rather than mere commemoration. Click to see photos from all three panels and a Wishing Tree commemorative event, as well as video from the "Performances of Protest," "Mobilizing Memory Sites," and "Intimate Archives/Political Violence" roundtable discussions.

The bulk of the meeting was devoted to the scholarly work that group members had exchanged and read in advance. The constructive feedback members received on their individual papers and projects generated revisions and a future series of group publications on “Mobilizing Memory: Practicing Politics,” “Intimate Entanglements: Rethinking Kinship and Sexuality,” and “Little Disturbances: Arts and Politics.”

Total immersion in repeated, face-to-face meetings throughout the week enabled the group members to evolve and to grow in their understanding of the material. Across the meetings, they had the chance to consider both the challenges and the benefits of transnational interdisciplinary work, and to practice their commitments to feminist solidarity and progressive social change.

Contributed by Marianne Hirsch, Co-Director, Women Mobilizing Memory

JUST PUBLISHED: Rachel Adams' Keywords for Disability Studies

Future of Disability Studies project director Rachel Adams has co-edited Keywords for Disability Studies with Benjamin Reiss (Emory University) and David H. Serlin (UCSD). 

Published this summer by NYU Press, the collection of 60 essays "aims to broaden and define the conceptual framework of disability studies for readers and practitioners in the field and beyond. The volume engages some of the most pressing debates of our time, such as prenatal testing, euthanasia, accessibility in public transportation and the workplace, post-traumatic stress, and questions about the beginning and end of life."

An invaluable resource for students and scholars alike, Keywords for Disability Studies brings the debates that have often remained internal to disability studies into a wider field of critical discourse, providing opportunities for fresh theoretical considerations of the field’s core presuppositions through a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Order copies of Keywords for Disability Studies here.  Learn more about the CSSD Future of Disability Studies working group here.

Gayatri Spivak Awarded Honorary Doctorate from Yale

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Director of the CSSD working group Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, received an Honorary Doctorate in the Humanities from Yale University.

Spivak is a University Professor at Columbia and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. The Rural-Urban Interface project researches the narratives of populations who migrate from the countrysides of Ghana and Kenya to those countries’ urban centers and focuses on the feminization of poverty.

JUST PUBLISHED: Rachel Adams on Access to Aid for the Disabled

Rachel Adams, director of the CSSD working group The Future of Disabilities Studies has published an article in Reuters on the problem of disabled individuals' unfettered access to assistance. Technological innovations are needed and appreciated, writes Adams, but bureaucracy and administrative inefficiency still stand in the way.

Read "What Google can learn from the wheelchair" here.

PUBLISHED: Debating a Testosterone "Sex Gap" in Science Magazine

Rebecca Jordan-Young, director of the CSSD working group on Science and Social Difference and Tow Associate Professor and Chair of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, has published an important article in Science magazine on the controversy and science surrounding levels of testosterone in female athletes. Jordan-Young maintains that calls to exclude women with high testosterone are not rooted in science but ultimately in social and ethical claims concerning how we understand and frame human diversity.

Read the article here.

CSSD Project's Digital Publishing Platform Wins NEH Grant

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant for 2015-2016 for the initial development of sx:archipelagos, a peer-reviewed digital publishing platform that emerged from CSSD's working group, the Digital Black Atlantic Project (DBAP).

Dedicated to research concerning the Caribbean, sx.archipelagos is produced by members of DBAP, which is directed by Kaiama Glover, and the Small Axe Project, a platform for intellectual criticism in the Caribbean. Focused on attenuating some of the disparities of access to scholarship about the Atlantic world for scholars and cultural actors in the Caribbean and Latin America, the platform has taken as its mandate an exploration of the economic feasibility of both 100% open-access and a streamlined production workflow for scholarly publication. Four members of DBAP, David Scott, Alex Gil, Kelly Baker Josephs, Kaiama Glover, along with several others will generate content for the initial launch of the project.

INTERVIEW: Farah Griffin Speaks with Toni Morrison in "Essence" Magazine

In April Essence magazine ran an interview with Toni Morrison by Farah Jasmine Griffin, director of the CSSD working group "Toward and Intellectual History of Black Women" and William B. Ransford Professor of English & Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia.

Morrison, who has just published her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, discussed with Griffin the themes of colorism, racism, and conceptions of beauty, which her latest work grapples with.

Read the interview here.

PUBLISHED: Mobilizing Memory Curators Interviewed by "n.paradoxa"

Feminist art journal n.paradoxa recently published an interview with Ayşe Gül Altınay and Işın Önol, curators of the successful exhibition "Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing."  The exhibition grew out of the CSSD working group Women Mobilizing Memory and has been produced at Depo in Istanbul and Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna.  The article is available for purchase here.

Katy Deepwell corresponded with both curators and discussed the dearth of both the gendered aspects of mass violence and the gendering of memory struggles in public debates. Altinay explained how the exhibit sought to address the role of witnessing as a practice of resistance. The curators wanted to give evidence of women using memories to organize, analyze, and cope. Altinay also notes that the artworks in the show particularly resist monumentality in favor of intimacy, pointing to an alternative mode of documenting violent pasts.

The exhibit reaches beyond the dichotomies of "women as victims vs. women as fighters" and "personal vs. public/political" and among other things uses the subtheme of "family," drawing connections between family photos and stories and national narratives of belonging and violence.

Altinay said the exhibit can be used to contextualize current conflicts with the Islamic State, Syria, and Iraq on the borders of Turkey. Pieces in the show can provide creative tools for struggling with wars and their memories in a gendered manner, claimed Altinay.

Önol commented on the different ways that the artworks show women using cameras to witness and record events related to war. They might record or revisit past events and thereby furnish alternative, subjective histories. The works might serve to collect existing information or they might provide proofs of suppressed facts.

Read the full article here.

Jean Howard Discusses Diversity Initiative in Columbia Spectator

Less than 25% of Columbia University's total faculty members are minorities and only 18% of its tenured faculty fit that demographic. The percentage of tenure track faculty that are women is a meager 26%.

In a recent article in the Columbia Spectator called "Leaks in the Pipeline," Jean Howard, CSSD director and George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, spoke about her efforts  to improve diversity when she served as the university's first provost for diversity initiatives.

From 2004 to 2007 she used $15 million in allocations to increase the number of female and minority hires in the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences, funding grants to support junior faculty research, and producing programs to provide mentoring for new faculty members. From 2004 to 2009, over 30 new minority faculty members were hired.

“There are some departments that have made enormous strides, and they have really become very diverse,” she says, pointing to the English and philosophy departments. “There are others that are doing very little, so a lot of the gains you see are in pockets."

"We had to start from scratch because there was nothing. Nothing," says Howard.

Read the article here.

DISCUSSION: Shoshana Magnet on Feminism, Robots, and Roaches

In early 2015 Shoshana Magnet, associate professor at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa, came to speak to CSSD's working group on Science and Social Difference about her feminist analysis of recent scientific inquiry into mixed societies of robots and insects.

Magnet, co editor of the text Feminist Surveillance Studies, discussed the field of biomimetics, where entomologists, roboticists, zoologists, and engineers analyze the natural world for guidance in solving problems. One such study by an interdisciplinary team examined robot-insect societies and how those subjects' interactions shape intelligence.

The Leurre Research group examined American Cockroaches living with robots coated in cockroach pheromones, finding that the cockroaches eventually began to follow marked robots into shelters they would not have ordinarily selected on their own. Thus, robots became integrated into the decision-making process of the cockroach society.

Although the results were interesting, Magnet found that the scientists selected only male cockroaches for their study, claiming that the presence of females would produce sexual behaviors that might mar the experiment results. According to Magnet this portrayal of “compulsory heterosexuality” in insect behavior and elsewhere is erroneous, as many animals, insects, and cockroaches participate in same-sex courtship. The scientists also excluded cockroaches with disabilities from the studies, prompting Magnet to consider the greater implications of studies that are heteronormative and ableist.

Magnet grounded her research in the feminist scientific philosopher Donna Haraway’s theory that species are really webs of relationships rather than distinct entities and that scientific research should be conducted as a relationship that involves interaction. This "dance of relating," as Haraway describes it, acknowledges the impossibility of a pure form of observation. Magnet also referenced physicist Karen Barad, who claims that a truly ethical research method requires that scientists must have an ethical relationship with the objects they study and that it must be imbued with a sense of scientific responsibility.

Magnet asked "What are the ethical implications of a scientific practice that claims to be able to eliminate queers, females, and those with disabilities?" She concluded that the Leurre experiments studied animal communications only as a means to better understand and facilitate social control in diverse human societies. In the words of the scientists, "We hope these experiments will enable the possibility to control such mixed societies.”

Magnet claimed that this irresponsible approach elides the rich possibilities of studying collective decision-making and that the gendered, sexualized, and able-bodied limitations on such research foregoes conclusions that might help disabled people or non-heterosexual people. Additionally, it would be useful to consider robot-cockroach relationships as a version of queer or "chosen" family, she said. This speaks to the recognition that kinship is a social and cultural matter, rather than a biological or natural fact.

Magnet concluded with the insight that during our current era of broad-based social movements characterized by collective forms of communication, studies such as the Leurre research are troubling because they ignore the possibility of diverse, mixed societies as sites for collective action in favor of focusing on communication that seeks to control cultural change while purging bodies of difference.

Contributed by Terry Roethlein, Communications Manager, CSSD.

JUST PUBLISHED: Farah Griffin's "Intellectual History of Black Women"

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, edited by Farah J. Griffin, co-director of the CSSD working group of the same name and Professor of English and African-American Studies at Columbia University, has been published by University of North Carolina Press.  

Professor Griffin's project co-directors Mia E. Bay (Rutgers University), Martha S. Jones (University of Michigan), and Barbara D. Savage (University of Pennsylvania) also co-edited the volume of essays in a passionate collective effort that spanned nine years.

The edited volume presents the work of black women writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, the 15 essays collected in Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women uncover the ideas of both formally educated and self-taught thinkers.

CSSD hosted one of four meetings held to foster discussion and criticism of the commissioned essays by colleagues and graduate students. Ultimately, the scholars planned to move intellectual inquiry "beyond the 'Great Men' paradigm" and lift up Black women's own intellectual achievements. The published result is an innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture.

The book is featured in the May issue of Essence Magazine and on the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan websites. Copies can be purchased here.

ROUNDTABLE Keywords: Trans

On April 9th, the Center for the Study of Social Difference and the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Council co-sponsored the roundtable discussion Keywords: TRANS.

The Keyword panel comprised Jack Halberstam, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California; Jack Pula, Instructor of Psychiatry, College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University and Chairperson of the Transgender Committee, Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists; and Yasmine Ergas, Co-Chair of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Council, Director of the Gender & Public Policy Specialization, and Lecturer in the Discipline of International and Public Affairs, SIPA. The program was moderated by Jean Howard, CSSD Director, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities and Chair, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.

Professor Halberstam spoke about artist Sara Davidmann's photo series chronicling the life of Davidmann's Uncle Ken, a married man who was trans* and simultaneously lived as K, something Ken and wife Hazel kept a secret until their deaths. Halberstam said K's life showed how trans* lives disrupted linear narratives and traditional ways of writing history. Halberstam argued that it is difficult to tell trans* histories because terms and definitions change so quickly and that scholars have focused on histories of violence at the expense of narratives about silence and secrecy. Halberstam also explained that trans* lives aren’t isolated from the stories of everyone else in their lives. Social norms and dominant categories affect the trans* person and influence the relationships they have. Halberstam suggested that scholars think about parallel lives in the experience of trans* persons so that in writing a narrative, no part of their life is erased.

 Jack Pula spoke about working professionally on gender dysphoria as a trans* man. Acknowledging that political controversy has followed psychiatrists’ definitions of gender identity, Pula considered how to combine subjective and objective forms of knowledge to make satisfactory claims about gender.

Pula warned that medicine and psychology often fall prey to reductive thinking, especially around identities that are known subjectively. Since language cannot capture all oppressed gender categories, it can itself become oppressive. Pula connected to Halberstam’s point about the difficulties inherent in using linear narrative to explain K and her gender identity. Pula argued that the etymology of identity could not begin with medicine and psychology because gender is first and foremost a subjective experience.

Yasmine Ergas examined the inchoate nature of the prefix "trans" and that "translation" was a process. In Ergas’s view, "trans-" as a prefix was insufficient, but still came closest to what it means to cross boundaries. Ergas shared how transnational surrogacy and adoption often leave children stateless and parentless. In its worst incarnation, transnational surrogacy has led to human trafficking.

For children, "trans-" is a matter of civic belonging. Ergas asserted that transnationalism challenged the presumption of national exclusivity and the processes of immigration, civil marriage, and the acceptance of educational credentials. Because of these structures, “transnational” still challenges a monopolistic system that, with limited exceptions, is based on an either/or binary. For surrogate children abandoned by their sponsors and who have no tie to national kin, this can mean existing in a legal no-man’s land. In the end, “transnational” remains anchored in the idea of nations.

The Q&A that followed the panel helped to weave together the presentations. Halberstam noted that just as "transnationalism" assumes the stability of the nation, "transgender" demonstrates the violence of gender dichotomies. Euro-American dichotomies of nation or gender continue to perpetuate colonialism and structure how scholars frame their research and get it funded. For Halberstam, transnationalism revealed how Euro-American constructions of transgender obscure other cultural and gender norms.

An audience member who saw limitations with the prefix "trans-" asked for alternatives. Ergas explained that dropping the prefix doesn’t obliterate the core words of nation or gender. In a sense, "trans-" implied a patchwork, she argued. Halberstam stated that people assemble under the heading trans* but often acknowledge more differences than similarities. The panel ended with an eye on the future: youth today speak more fluently than ever before about trans* life and this suggests the possibility for more humane understandings of individuals connected to the word.

Contributed by George Aumoithe, Graduate Assistant, Center for the Study of Social Difference and Ph.D. candidate in American history. Images of 1) K, Digital print of 1954 photograph with hand-tinting and acrylic paint, 2013 by Sara Davidmann 2) Jack Halberstam and Jack Pula 3) Jack Pula and Yasmine Ergas. Last two images: 2015 by George Aumoithe.

ROUNDTABLE: Women Mobilizing Memory "Keywords"

Vulnerability. Reaction. Privilege. Heritage. Utopia. What associations do these “keywords” evoke? What concepts do they represent? How are these ideas used by scholars, or put into practice by activists? What kinds of work can we do with a keyword, what conversations can keywords unlock?  

These were some of the questions asked at a recent roundtable discussion by Women Mobilizing Memory, a CSSD working group exploring issues of memory, witnessing, testimony, and trauma from a cross-cultural feminist perspective. For this project, students in graduate programs at Sabancı University (Istanbul), Columbia University, and New York University teamed up in pairs, selected their keywords, and finally presented the fruits of their collaboration in the form of a roundtable at the Columbia campus in New York.

Reflecting on the circumstances in which their discussion took place, Alyssa Greene (Columbia) and Armanc Yıldız (Sabancı University) considered the keyword privilege, acknowledging the immense institutional privilege that enabled the roundtable, and by extension their own critical examination of the word “privilege” itself. Their presentation urged a consideration of how privilege can easily be forgotten by those who benefit from it. The duo did not necessarily condemn privilege, but noted that it was an “unevenly distributed” resource, creating all kinds of differences between those it touches and those it does not. These differences can silence certain conversations, but they can also produce other kinds—like Greene and Yıldız’s reflections on how privilege made their conversation possible.

In a similar vein, the keyword reaction sparked thoughts on the role of the environment where groups like Women Mobilizing Memory do their work. Dilara Çalışkan (Sabancı) and Andrea Crow (Columbia) suggested that a “critical attention to historic and economic forces” is necessary. For example, how does the physical location of this roundtable at Columbia University, or the fact of it being conducted in English, shape the kind of work being done? “Reaction” can be an emotional response that tells us something about how we relate to the ideas, people, and circumstances that surround us. In a feminist perspective, reactions can be a revealing part of academic work.

The issue of translation, both literal and figurative, came up in the work of Nicole Gervasio (Columbia) and Bürge Abiral (Sabancı) on vulnerability. There is no precise translation of “vulnerability” in Turkish. The Turkish equivalent would mean something like “weakness” or “exposure to the possibility of being harmed.” Their co-written paper pointed out that vulnerability has become “not just a keyword, but a keystone” in the #blacklivesmatter movement: the practice of “die-ins” works as a deliberate public display of vulnerability. Vulnerability can be leveraged as a form of strength and protest, yet vulnerability can also be misappropriated by perpetrators of violence to justify their actions.

A common feature of the five keywords is that they have widely varying meanings that depend on context. Such was the case with utopia, analyzed by R. Ertug Altinay (NYU) and Pınar Ensari (Sabancı). The pair cautioned against an association of utopia with liberal ideals and progressive politics. Utopia has a dark side, too: utopia produces difference and exclusion—what is a utopian vision for the group envisioning it can easily become dystopian for other groups. With heritage as well, chosen by Henry Castillo (NYU) and Leticia Robles-Moreno (NYU), perspective matters immensely. The pair emphasized a distinction between official and unofficial forms of heritage. One is sanctioned by state and government while the other is constructed within the local environment of a specific community. Castillo provocatively asserted that heritage, in this latter sense, is the memory of individuals and communities—not an object or material possession. Yet it is embodied, too: Robles-Moreno continued the discussion by suggesting that the female body can transmit heritage biologically and symbolically through generation.

Contributed by Grace Delmolino, PhD Candidate in Italian/ICLS and 2014-15 IRWGS Graduate Fellow

LECTURE: Ron Suskind on "Narratives of Earned Hope: Or the Ways Adversity Can Build Compensatory Strengths"

Speaking on Wednesday, March 25th before an audience sponsored by the Center for the Study of Social Difference's Future of Disability Studies workshop, Ron Suskind shared his story about pursuing a demanding career in investigative journalism while raising his autistic son Owen. Whether explaining socio-economics in the inner-city, public policy, or his own family, Suskind argued that adversity was a necessary precondition in order to produce insightful journalism.

Suskind won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1995 after publishing a series of articles that became his first book A Hope in the Unseen. The book describes the life of Cedric Jennings, who grew up in inner city Washington, DC before attending Brown University. Suskind followed with three books about the George W. Bush administration’s planning for the Iraq War, their post-9/11 intelligence activities, and their response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

To write about Owen in Life, Animated, however, Suskind wrestled with how to treat his family with the same tough standards that won him wide acclaim for his previous reporting. Suskind employed many of the same methods when interviewing his wife Cornelia, their eldest son Walter, and Owen himself, who now lives independently of his family.

When Owen was first born, his family noticed that he did not exhibit the same interpersonal skills—namely eye contact—that most children acquired by his age. Only after the family sat down to watch The Little Mermaid did Owen sustain eye contact with them. This observation led Suskind and Cornelia to use the personas of Disney characters to communicate with Owen.

One evening, after Suskind and Cornelia put Owen to bed, Suskind snuck into Owen’s bedroom with a puppet of Genie from the movie Aladdin. When he popped up from underneath Owen’s bedspread with Genie, Owen had his first extended conversation with his father for the very first time.

Knowing that Disney films would enable Owen to speak about his feelings, Suskind and his family watched hundreds of hours as the basis for dialogue.

Today, Owen is working with filmmaker Roger Williams to produce a documentary about A Life, Animated.

While writing about his family for a public audience was difficult, Suskind argued that journalism was capable of conveying both the joy and pain of family life and especially for families living with disability. While interviewing his family members revealed painful memories, it was also a therapeutic process. Suskind exhorted the audience of journalists and scholars to "seek the jewel." He concluded, "Human beings are not cardboard cutouts. We all have a heart and a soul.”

Interviewing his family forced them to remember a past when Owen’s condition was opaque, but the process of narrating their journey helped place their present-day triumphs in a larger context of "earned hope." For families with disability, Suskind's Life, Animated serves as a template for how to help others understand disability through personal narrative.

Contributed by George Aumoithe, Graduate Assistant, Center for the Study of Social Difference

Image of Ron Suskind in the World Room at Pulitzer Hall at Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015, by George Aumoithe.