RGFGV Conference Report on “Global Governance of the Intimate”

The project on Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence (RGFGV) convened a major international workshop on September 7-8, 2018. Global Governance of the Intimate was the second in a series of international workshops that opened with workshop in Amman a year earlier, hosted at the Columbia Global Center | Middle East, Amman. A group of twenty-five scholars, journalists, lawyers and activists met for two intensive days of collaborative research sharing and brainstorming at Columbia University in New York City.

The RGFGV project seeks to track and analyze the growing prominence of the global agenda against “violence against women” (VAW) and “gender-based violence” (GBV), whether in international law and global governance, practical interventions, or international media coverage. Participants and organizers who had presented at the Amman workshop opened the first session with an overview of how the three conceptual domains that had organized the earlier work of the project intersected with the new scholarship being presented. The key themes were: Narratives and the Framing of VAW/GBV, Alternative Trajectories and Experiences, and Governance and Resource Distribution.  

Urgent questions that had emerged under the theme of Narratives and Framing of VAW/GBV had included the following: How do certain aspects of social life become labeled VAW or GBV? What actors or phenomena get highlighted under these rubrics, and which disappear? Do these narratives racialize religion or culture? Leti Volpp had examined how the insertion of “honor killings” in both versions of the U.S. Executive Orders now referred to as the “Muslim travel ban” worked to frame VAW/GBV in terms of religious difference and has implicated GBV in national governance. Sara Ababneh’s presentation at the New York workshop expanded this discussion by analyzing how intimate violence was portrayed differently in Jordan and the U.S..

Although co-director Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was unable to attend the NYC workshop, Rema Hammami gave some background on her previous contribution on the everydayness of state violence as experienced by Palestinian school girls in occupied East Jerusalem. She had shown how the dominant frames of GBV are unable to recognize either the gendered violence of colonial rule or the sexualization of everyday surveillance.  Nadje Al-Ali’s work picked up on these questions of how to analyze gender based violence in the Middle East, exploring dilemmas and tensions she has faced as a feminist scholar and activist researching VAW/GBV, whether in her previous work in Iraq or her new work on the Kurdish women’s movement and queer feminist activism in Lebanon.

Shahla Talabi, whose earlier contribution to the Amman workshop had been a sensitive analysis of the specific inflections of rape narratives in the cases of three former Iranian women political prisoners discussed Zahra Ali’s presentation on feminist mobilization in Iraq. In the current Iraqi context, she showed how Islam is used by both religious and secular forces to undermine feminist demands.

The kinds of questions posed under the theme of Governance and Resource Distribution related to how the anti-VAW/GBV agendas have been implicated in practices of governance and governmentality and in particular the networks through which GBV/VAW have emerged as key to global, national and local agendas. Hammami summarized the paper she had presented in Amman on the distributional effects of the global GBV agenda. She had studied “humanitarian GBV” in Gaza, detailing the ways that local women’s NGOs, starved for resources, get both channeled to narrow and redefine their work and yet attempt to contest the logics of the humanitarian apparatus through everyday means of offering basic support to women.  Hammami was well-positioned to comment on Aditi Suri von Czechowski’s study of the language of care and the pedagogy of human rights in the Nyarugusu Congolese refugee camp in Tanzania. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the camp, she showed how the GBV apparatus and the framework of humanitarian care seek to push responsibility for their predicaments onto refugee women themselves through insisting that they repudiate “harmful traditional practices,” as they acquire knowledge about human rights and consciousness about the definitions of domestic violence.

In her overview of the previous workshop in Amman, Lila Abu-Lughod described her own contribution on the latest phase of a politicized process of blaming religion for violence. She had examined the puzzling embrace by women’s rights advocates of initiatives on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). The ways these initiatives link violence with Islam and Muslims was further elaborated in this workshop by Vasuki Nesiah, whose paper explored the convergence of a number of governance projects – countering violent extremism, international conflict feminism focused on VAW/GBV, and international criminal law – in the then ongoing International Criminal Court case of Al Hassan Mohamed of Mali.

Five themes structured the NYC workshop panels: (1) Narratives and Framing of VAW/GBV, (2) Feminist Dilemmas in Framing GBV, (3) Challenges of Media, (4) Governance and Activism, and (5) Dilemmas of GBV activism on the Ground. The work presented was based on research in and on a range of countries in the Middle East and South Asia, including Pakistan, Iraq, Jordan, India, Tanzania, Syria and Mali. As at the previous workshop, a crucial thread that ran through the work presented at the Global Governance of the Intimate: the politicized link being made between religious extremism, political Islam and GBV, a connection exploited in the U.S.  “Muslim Ban” that singled out so-called “honor killings,” as Volpp had argued. Important questions were raised in this workshop: Is violence more legible when religion is present? What mobilizes feminists to do something about it? How do we understand the ways that religion may be linked to personal violence while taking seriously the sociopolitical and historical contexts?  Is only the violence of individuals who can be associated with groups and nations to which the U.S. is hostile be considered responsible for gender based violence? Since refugee women must frame their experiences with sexual violence in terms that meet requirements for asylum and care, how are their experiences reshaped to align with the hegemonic rhetoric shared by international media and humanitarian organizations?

Given the key role of religion in these narratives that frame GBV in the South Asian and Middle Eastern contexts in which the participants work, Janet Jakobsen’s contributions as a scholar of religion was especially useful to the discussion as it laid a framework for understanding how to better think about religion, and to be critical of the ways religion and terrorism have become co-constituted categories as part of a complex network of political relations. The goal, Jakobsen argued, is not to remove religion when we talk about violence but how to think differently about the ways in which religion comes to interact with GBV.

The challenges posed by various forms of media and visual representations of violence by and against Muslims loomed large for the journalists, activists, and scholars participating in the workshop. Ababneh analyzed media portrayals of honor killings in American media outlets. She argued, as did Urooj Arshad, an activist and director of International LGBTQ Youth Health and Rights Programs at Advocates for Youth, that discourse on intimate partner violence and violence against LGBTQs in the U.S. are constructed as non-cultural, unmotivated by Christianity, and unrelated to the motivations attributed to “honor killings.” These contrasting constructions reflect the hypocrisies of Orientalist discourses.  As the columnist Rafia Zakaria concurred, negative behaviors of racialized actors are blamed on culture and religion.

Nina Berman, an award-winning photo-journalist at Columbia’s School of Journalism gave remarkable evidence of this through her presentation on representations of gender-based violence and conflict rape by major U.S. and European magazines, focusing particularly on depictions of the sexual violence of Boko Haram. Berman examined the media layouts used in visualizing conflict rape and noted the double standards that regulate the work of white reporters who venture abroad to document the experiences of non-white rape survivors for American/European audiences versus those who document domestic stories of rape. Understatement and anonymity are the standards now.  What are the implications of this type of reporting that highlights brown and black perpetrators and elides sexual violence in U.S. contexts?

Media representations were also the focus of two of the papers on South Asia.  Shenila Khoja-Moolji traced media representation of the murdered Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel, known for her sexually provocative videos. Inderpal Grewal looked to media to interrogate the historical and contemporary consumption of “communal violence” by consumer citizens and the affects associated with “lynchings” of Muslim men.  

Samira Shackle, one of the three Media Fellows selected for the second phase of the RGFGV project, presented the list of “how to report on GBV” that she had developed from Hammami’s suggestions at the previous workshop in Amman. One goal of reporting is to let women tell their stories on their own terms, yet the stories they tell must be critically analyzed insofar as women learn how to frame their experiences with gender based or sexual violence to meet requirements for asylum or appeal for aid and care.  This mediation of stories was clear from Rupal Oza’s study of rape accusations and cases in the police stations and courts of rural Haryana. Accused of false rape claims, individual women’s helplessness and their accusers’ class status were crucial to the outcomes. Maryam Saleh, The Intercept reporter echoed Shackle’s warnings on how to report on GBV, taking issue with the ways journalists have represented the conflict in Syria and offered stories of Syrian refugee women without historical and political contexts.

Confronting Orientalist assumptions about the relationship between religion, culture, and violence, those involved in the Global Governance of the Intimate addressed through regional case studies the way the neoliberal human rights framework and the hegemonic discourse about culture and religion as sources of women’s oppression distract attention from forms of systemic violence, whether geopolitical or economic that should be viewed as part of GBV or VAW.  The participants outlined the need for feminists to challenge the premises of CVE and a-historical media coverage of GBV as well as to interrogate the apparatuses of transnational governance that construct certain issues—such as “child marriage” in Bangladesh--as urgent problems while ignoring other sources of violence and suffering in the often deadly situations in which people  are living gendered lives around the globe. Engaging with the assumptions and policies that have underwritten the unprecedented public concern about VAW/GBV, the scholars, activists, lawyers and journalists brought their perspectives to the unfolding dynamics of these agendas within international governance, local communities, humanitarian aid, and legal activism in varied sites in the Middle East and South Asia, including among immigrants in the U.S.   Shagufta Shah from the Arab-American Family Support Center and  Urooj Arshad working on LGBTQ rights and violence in the U.S. faced challenges similar to those that confront critical journalists and feminist scholars when they attempt to address fraught issues of gender and violence in Muslim-majority and minority countries.

The contributions and discussions underlined how the well-worn frames of Islamic violence, culture, and patriarchy remain central in the production of a variety of problematic projects directly or indirectly tied to the global anti-gender violence agenda. The participants were struck by the variety of projects operating at different levels and across different domains (national, geopolitical, local, legal, popular cultural, developmental, and humanitarian) that bring together gender, violence, and Islam together in often unexpected ways. The comparative analyses of South Asia and the Middle East were illuminating: in many cases there are strong parallels, while in others, historical and political context worked to produce much more specific configurations of the broader issues

The next step for the project is the preparation of an edited volume that will bring together papers prepared for this and past workshops. The book will include the rich and varied treatments of the central themes that have emerged for the project across contexts in the two regions or at a broader level concerning Muslims.  Some focus on the larger geopolitical projects—including new iterations or emergent configurations of the war on terror. Others address the GBV agenda as part of the emerging arsenal within the politics of populist nationalism. A number address the themes within the context of developmental or humanitarian governmentalities and in relation to NGOs and local activisms. Yet others use detailed analysis of local sites and located experiences of violence in order to challenge or confound the assumptions of the dominant frames of feminist concerns with violence. The collection will offer new thinking that will provide resources for challenging this powerful and often destructive truth regime.  

The RGFGV project is supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and is co-directed by Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, Janet Jakobsen and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.

Prepared by Laela Shallal and Lila Abu-Lughod

Women Creating Change Hosts Corporate Feminism & Its Discontents Round Table

On Wednesday March 13, 2019, days after International Women’s Day, Women Creating Change at the Center for the Study of Social Difference hosted a roundtable discussion to explore the successes and limitations of policies to promote diversity and inclusion in the corporate sector. Held at Maison Francaise, the “Corporate Feminism & Its Discontents” roundtable included notable speakers such as Janice Ellig, Chief Executive Officer of the Ellig Group, Professor Yasmine Ergas, lecturer and director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy at the School of International and Public Affairs, Melissa Fisher, a cultural anthropologist who writes on finance, feminism, and the workplace, and Katherine Phillips, the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School.

The interdisciplinary panel was introduced by Women Creating Change Leadership Council (WCCLC) Chair Ann Kaplan, Chair and founder of Circle Financial Group. Moderator of the roundtable, Janice Ellig, started off the conversation by detailing her first hand experiences in corporate America and how these experiences inform her belief that a shift toward gender parity needs to happen from the top. She also recognized the impact of women leaders like Diana Taylor, new WCCLC member, who has served as a leader on the issue of women entering into the corporate world and the necessity for such committed leadership to promote and advance the rights of women in the corporate field.

Through an interdisciplinary look at both the progress and regress in the field, the “Corporate Feminism & Its Discontents” roundtable discussed the achievements made by women in the corporate sector in recent years, and shed light on the existing gender and racial disparities in the sector, especially in its higher echelons, which remain significant in the United States and Europe.

As the conversation progressed, Professor Phillips discussed the ways in which most organizations were not designed to have women be apart of them in addition to findings that nevertheless demonstrate that firms with more women in leadership positions perform better. She cited her own research, which confirms the benefit of having different people working together and how such diversity creates higher levels of productivity. However, she acknowledged that despite growing evidence, many are still not convinced, exemplified by research that shows men are less likely to help women in management positions. explains how women’s knowledge isnt fully utilized, another barrier women face in their careers

During her presentation, Melissa Fisher addressed the critique of corporate feminism as not addressing race and class. She questioned how the relationships between capitalism and feminism work themselves out in everyday life and cites different dimensions that need to be looked at and pushed: equity, social imagination, and forging alliances. Fisher ended by highlighting the benefits of looking at feminism as an assemblage, both mobile and connective in order to mobilize it in novel ways. She concluded with optimism in the way labor is bridging boundaries and translating domains.

Professor Ergas expanded the conversation further by discussing the motherhood penalty on pay scales for women in the workplace. She explained that the context of the corporation is just as important as what is taking place within the corporation in terms of gender change. Additionally, she noted how global leaders and politics continue to marginalize women and how policies continue to push women into the sphere of the home and away from the workplace. “We need a huge collective conversation that prompts us all to think about feminism,” Professor Ergas urged. She also highlighted the necessity of pushing back against those, such as oppressive leaders and gender traditionalists, who view the glass as too full by insisting against further progress towards gender equality. Encouragingly however she proclaimed that “The best thing about the backlash is the backlash to the backlash.”

Reframing Transgender Violence: Notes from a Two-Day Workshop

On January 24-25, 2019, the Center for the Study of Social Difference presented its final scheduled public workshop in the first iteration of its Reframing Gendered Violence working group. Reframing Transgender Violence was organized by Nash Professor of Law Kendall Thomas and featured scholars, activists, attorneys, and graduate students working across issues of transgender violence and justice.

Audience members filled the Jerome Greene Annex at Columbia Law School to hear these speakers give 20 minute presentations and to interact with them in lengthy Q&A discussions, in what was designed as an informal workshop setting to give space to explore the variety of topics being covered. A full video of the proceedings will be made available to the public, and it is the hope of Professor Thomas that these conversations can continue with possible publication of the speakers’ comments, as well.

Beyond Accepted Tendencies of Normative Genders

Jennifer Boylan, the Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College, opened our workshops on January 24th by moderating a discussion between Asli Zengin (Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology and the Pembroke Center at Brown) and Catherine Clune-Taylor (Postdoc in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton) regarding how we approach the idea of violence against transgender people. Zengin challenged us to see violence as another way of looking at social relations rather than as a binary of perpetrator and victim. Clune-Taylor agreed “about violence as a kind of social relation,” but stated that she also sees “something in terms of how individual bodies are mined for data production” as a form of violence. Zengin emphasized that Turkey, like North America, is quite heterogeneous, and that in both places visibility comes at the cost of more violence. Clune-Taylor avoids intersecting discussions of gender and race because “often there is a distinction made between how intersex communities/conditions are approached in North America (i.e., white populations) and how they are approached in racialized “other” communities,” with the latter often viewed as backward, less advanced.

Both Zengin and Clune-Taylor worked to give us a sense that many in this field are working much more capaciously than simply considering accepted tendencies of normative genders. Our speakers discussed the concept of gender for a person as a trajectory that changes over time and emphasized the problem of intersex children having a gender assigned to them at birth.

Limits of the Law and Extra-legal Structures for Survival

We began day two of our workshops on Jan 25th with two of Professor Thomas’s former “Law and Sexuality” seminar students from 2009-10, Sergio Suiama (Federal Prosecutor in Rio de Janeiro) and Chinyere Ezie (Lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights), in conversation with Chase Strangio (Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project). These speakers led a conversation on the uses and limits of the legal framework for addressing issues of transgender violence, and issues of advocacy and activism for transgender people.

Suiama led the discussion with a presentation on transgender violence in Brazil, which has the highest incidences of violence against transgender people, including 868 murders between 2008 and 2016. He warned of increased danger for the transgender community after recent elections, despite 53 transgender candidates running for office in 2018. Suiama shared an especially powerful and disturbing video clip in which Damares Regina Alves, an evangelical pastor and Minister of Human Rights, Family and Women under new President Jair Bolsonaro, calls for “no ideological indoctrination in the classroom” and declares girls princesses and boys princes.

Ezie and Strangio had a conversation that brought the problems of existing systems to the fore, with Ezie blaming a “social structure that accepts colonialism as a basis of civilization.” Strangio asked us what it means to look at societal and government structures that have been designed to maintain inequality in the US and elsewhere, citing the example of the US as having a criminal justice system that deals with interpersonal violence by perpetuating state violence (e.g., the state’s ability to incarcerate bodies for the purpose of “protecting” other bodies). Ezie emphasized that people are too often forced to tell stories that are not their own but rather the easy story to tell, again looking to the treatment of intersex children as an example. How would it be, Ezie challenged us, if we were forced to identify our race on our birth certificate in the same way we are forced to choose a gender?

Professor Thomas pointed out that all three speakers were expressing a critique of trans legalism, yet, he said, “you are all, in some way, state agents, relying on state work to minimize trans injustice.” Strangio agreed, with the addition, “if you’re teaching at a law school, you’re an agent of the state” just as “we are also agents of the state if we’ve gone to law school.” For this reason, Strangio emphasized the importance of his work with international activists, looking at the survival structures that people set up, and how the state is encroaching on them. Strangio left us with the question, “How can we make it apparent and disrupt the ways the state is preventing our survival, our extra-legal structures for survival?”

The Limits of Current Critical Methods

Professor Thomas moderated our second discussion of the day, with Christina Hanhardt (Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Maryland-College Park) and C. Riley Snorton (Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality, University of Chicago).

Hanhardt led off with a history of transgender violence, while Snorton asked us to put a “temporal emphasis on history’s own terms” and to understand the ongoing struggle in the present by imaging a future where Black Lives Matter and Trans Lives Matter matter to everyone.

Just as the first discussion of the day looked at the limits of using the legal system to address trans violence, this discussion addressed the limits of current critical trans methods. Hanhardt reminded us that there is often a place of putting things/people in categories of good vs bad and challenged us to look at how our sets of knowledge are made in our academic disciplines and categories. Snorton asked us to look more closely at politics of solidarity and stated, “when we only look at trans violence as murder,” we ignore other areas of vulnerability for trans people that have to do with relations to other ways of living, including slow death through the “impossibility of trans lives.”

The Critical Nature of Continuing this Work

Our final discussion of the two-day workshop was led by a presentation on incarceration of transgender people by Joss Taylor Greene, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. Greene posited that there is a panic about disruption of sexuality identity categories in places like prisons and women’s colleges, tying in many themes covered by previous speakers, including the usefulness and the challenges of opacity with dealing with systems of structural violence.

Greene’s interlocutor Jack Halberstam (Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies, Columbia University) concluded our two days by addressing the question whether we should we separate “queer” and “trans” studies. He suggested that we not, as, after all, these “populations are simultaneously produced by regimes.”

Workshop organizer Professor Thomas emphasized the fittingness of ending our discussions with a dissertation project, as a testament to the “critical nature of continuing this work” on the reframing of transgender violence.

 

Contributed by Catherine LaSota, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference

The Pedagogy of Dignity: Prison Education, Part 2 Event Recap

On Sunday September 30th 2018, the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University hosted its second Pedagogy of Dignity workshop at Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts, in connection with the Pedagogies of Dignity working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference. The workshop brought together 40 formerly incarcerated students, academics, prison educators, activists, undergraduates, and postgraduates, to discuss the benefits and challenges of prison education, present our pedagogical ideas, and prepare participants to teach in Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC).

Working with the educational staff at MDC, we have organized a series of mini-courses that are available to the men of MDC, regardless of educational background. Since February, over 140 incarcerated men have attended our courses. Each class is a combination of serious ideas, Theatre of the Oppressed exercises, and skill development. The mini-course program has been an enormous success. Our classes are over-enrolled and the MDC staff is eager for more courses.

Professor Christia Mercer hosted the event, Morgaine Gooding-Silverwood led Theatre of the Oppressed exercises and mock classes, and the award-winning documentary film maker, Jac Gares, filmed as part of her upcoming documentary on our Pedagogy of Dignity work, with videographer Isaac Scott. (The video is available here.)

Participants
In attendance were special guests including:
● Jennifer Lackey, the Director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program and the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, who regularly teaches college-level courses at Stateville Correctional Center and in Division 10 of the Cook County Department of Corrections;
● Formerly incarcerated students Syretta Wright, Miranda McConniughey, Isaac Scott, Aisha Elliot, and Jarrell Daniels;
● Staff members from Metropolitan Detention Center: Michelle Gantt (Education Supervisor at the Metropolitan Detention, federal prison), Jason Murray, and Ciara Pemberton;
● Brooklyn Public Defender and Columbia Philosophy alumna Susannah Karlsson;
● Columbia Philosophy Graduate Students;
● Columbia and Barnard Undergraduate Students;
● Columbia Faculty from Philosophy, Political Science, Law, Religion, History, English and Comparative Literature; and
● Faculty from other universities, including David Velleman from NYU.

Background
The issue that our Pedagogy of Dignity approach seeks to address is that many people – even well-intending volunteer teachers – assume that teaching in prison is like normal teaching, but with challenges. We reject this assumption. At the Pedagogy of Dignity workshop, we debated, analyzed, and tweaked our pedagogical approach that members of our group first developed at Taconic Correctional Facility and honed at Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center fall 2017.

The first idea underpinning our Pedagogy of Dignity is that the harsh realities of incarceration render less suitable the traditional classroom pedagogy according to which instructors transmit their knowledge to (mostly) passive learners. It has been our experience that incarcerated people -- the vast majority of whom have been gravely underserved in schools -- are best served when classroom work is broken up with improvisational exercises that employ Theatre of the Oppressed methods. Nearly 80% of incarcerated women suffered 1 physical abuse as children and 33% have survived rape. Roughly 75% of incarcerated people are functionally illiterate. Such students deserve an enlivened classroom experience that breaks down hierarchies and creates an environment that enables self-expression and its accompanying self- affirmation. 2

The second idea grounding our Pedagogy of Dignity is that incarcerated students do not need saving. Although prison culture forces inhabitants to endure oppressive rules and suffer injustices, imprisoned students are eager to take full advantage of the opportunities offered them and extremely resilient in supporting one another in doing so. Too many volunteer instructors have, what activists in our group call, “a savior complex.” In the words of one of our collaborators, Isaac Scott (formerly incarcerated artist, activist): “volunteers often see themselves as responsible to save their incarcerated students” in a way that “can cause more harm than good.” Instead of seeing incarcerated students as people who need saving, Scott insists that students be allowed “to empower themselves so as to restore their own self-image.” The main goal of our pedagogy is to create an environment in which students’ experiences and perspectives are respected and highlighted so that students can enrich their own sense of agency, discover that their experiences count as knowledge, and empower themselves. Theater of the Oppressed techniques were originally designed exactly to increase participants’ agency and accompanying sense of self-worth and dignity.

1 Developed by Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed includes “improvisation and other techniques to break down hierarchies and promote social and political change.” Boal’s goal was “to explore, show, analyze and transform the reality in which the participants are living.” 2 The lawyer of one of our students sent a letter in which he wrote: “I think [name of student] won’t mind me telling you that your course has significantly added meaning and purpose to his life in federal prison.”

Our Teaching in MDC
A subset of our group developed the Pedagogy of Dignity over four years of teaching in Taconic Correctional Facility and then had the opportunity to experiment with it in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), which is a federal maximum security jail. Our course has been considered a huge success both by the students and by the educational staff at MDC. During a ceremony at the end of one semester, organized by Dr. Michelle Gantt (MDC, Director of Education), one student said: “I thought my brain had stopped working and would never work again. The reading, discussing, and [improvisational] work we’ve done, it’s proven to me that my brain still works. I’m ready to use it more.”

Dr. Gantt was so pleased by the course, some of which she observed, and by the student response, that she approached us to create a special program in MDC. Working in close collaboration with MDC staff, we have instituted a series of 4-week courses that have been made available to anyone in MDC, whether or not they have a high school degree. In an extraordinary gesture of trust, MDC has allowed us to train volunteers and escort them into this maximum-security prison without the normal rigorous screening. Each class has been a combination of serious ideas and texts, Theatre of the Oppressed exercises, and skill-development.

The Pedagogy of Dignity Workshop
At the workshop, Professor Christia Mercer and justice educator, activist, and theater artist Morgaine Gooding-Silverwood introduced the day, giving an overview of the MDC program, the Pedagogy of Dignity, and Theatre of the Oppressed exercises. Gooding-Silverwood said, “The purpose is to teach university professors to be more human and relaxed and nuanced in their approach to education in prison.” The approach is a means of raising professors’ awareness about the fact that there is no structure for rehabilitation for incarcerated students, that students in the classroom have a lot to teach professors, the importance of professors allowing themselves to be intellectually vulnerable in the prison classroom and open to learning from the students.

Theatre of the Oppressed is a form of community theatre created by Augusto Boal in Brazil based on the idea that anyone can be an actor, but also provides the foundation for important philosophical and social discussions. Theatre of the Oppressed is important because it encourages us to fail and to make mistakes. For example, one of the exercises “Name Gumbo” is where people switch names as they introduce themselves, and carry on their new name when they introduce themselves to the next person. It teaches us that we don’t listen very well.

Formerly incarcerated students Isaac Scott, Aisha Elliot, Syretta Wright, Miranda McConniughey, and Jarrell Daniels, and Brooklyn Public Defender Susannah Karlsson discussed the challenges, benefits, and goals of incarceration and education. Formerly incarcerated student Jarrell Daniels explains, “For us, education is the only way for us to come out of the mud, or as we say, the trenches... Unfortunately when we were raised in our communities we didn’t look at education as a tool that would lift us up out of the trenches.”

Morgaine Gooding-Silverwood and Aisha Elliott lead a discussion with experienced MDC educators about the challenges and goals for educators. The main goals include helping students to find intellectual joy and excitement in a difficult place, promoting self-respect and dignity, and discovering power in education. Other goals include developing skills in discussing, reading, essay writing, and note taking.

The challenges include how to create a classroom without hierarchy, and to encourage students to share in the education process. Students’ knowledge and their knowledge of self has been devalued in the space in which they have been forced to exist. That’s why in every class, there is a teacher plus an intern. Christia Mercer explains, “The professor is the brain, or as I like to say, the ‘brainy heart’, and the intern is the heart, or the ‘hearty brains’ so to speak.” The intern, or assistant, is responsible for helping with group work, as well as to be an emotional bridge between the instructor and the students. For example, as Morgaine Gooding-Silverwood notes, assistants ask questions when students might be too nervous to ask, and break down the barriers and walls to create trust in the classroom.

Other challenges include how to get professors to feel comfortable, confident, and to use their voices to engage with students and themselves on a human level. Gooding-Silverwood says, “It is very easy when you’re in an ivory tower to be all about your books and your writing and not about face to face interaction with people. In prison that is the entirety of what our classes are. We can’t bring in huge textbooks for people to look at. You can’t come and lecture for an hour because it’s not going to get through to people. You have to be able to have an interactive classroom discussion and dialogue.”

The day was interspersed with Theatre of the Oppressed exercises, including Image of a Word (where participants use their body to express a word) and a Slow Motion Race (where the last person to reach the finish line wins). We ended the day with mock classes and brainstormed about attaining our goals. After the workshop, the speakers and key participants went to Dinosaur BBQ for a debrief and working group dinner.

The event was sponsored by Center for the Study of Social Difference and the Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia donated space for the event.

Next Steps
We are continuing our MDC program, teaching 4-week courses with 20 students in each course. In Spring 2019, we will host another working group meeting to review our progress and goals.

Unpayable Debt: A Student’s Reflections on the Launch of Max Haiven’s Art After Money, Money After Art and Caribbean Debt Syllabus, Second Edition

On October 10, 2018, the Center for the Study of Social Difference working group Unpayable Debt held an event to launch scholar Max Haiven’s book, Art After Money, Money After Art, and the second edition of Caribbean Debt Syllabus, the only digital resource available to study the significant impact of debt in Caribbean’s past and present.

I found many elements of Max Haiven’s discussion about the increasingly blurred line between artists and activists fascinating. I heard him make parallels to surrealism, expressing that our potential is beyond the scope of our imaginations and that we can use various conceptual tools to reflect on this sublime potential. Financialization, hedge funds and big investment banks dominating a capitalistic economy hinder us from discovering the full breadth of our imagination, and Haiven calls upon artists/activists to combat this.

Haiven explains money as a force that has so much power over our lives--but it can be a medium of oppression and exploitation or a medium of creativity. It can be used as a medium to disrupt capitalism, telling stories and carrying certain values that transcend an exploitative, oppressive system, he contends.

I am left wondering, however, how much this conception of currency really translates into the Caribbean landscape. I used to live in Jamaica, where my dad is from, and my mom is from Guyana--thinking about these two countries I grew up between, I really don’t know how much people would care about the appearance of currency as a form of protest against capitalism. I’m thinking of someone in a long line to get two beef patties in Kingston, perhaps the most accessible and cheapest meal there--would they pay attention to the aesthetic of the currency? This would be a great experiment, though.

In terms of the additions to the Caribbean Debt Syllabus, I was especially moved by the presenters on indenture and law. The topic of indenture is particularly interesting to me since my mother’s ancestors were East Indian indentured laborers in Guyana. I grew up hearing my family members refer to themselves as “coolie.” Although the presenter’s area of focus was mainly in Suriname, her depiction of different ethnic groups in that society as separate yet respected in theory resonated with me. Yes, everyone is separate--my family’s home there in Berbice is literally flanked by East Indian homes on one side of the street, across from only black homes on the other. The indentured society is certainly separate--but how can each group even have the opportunity to respect the other with such little interaction between them? Respecting another group cannot take the form of complete isolation from them. I plan on writing my final paper for Jose Moya’s class, World Migration, on indentured labor in Guyana, so I actually wrote down some of the presenter’s sources that will definitely be useful for that.

I plan on going to law school after I graduate, so I found the law addition to the syllabus very compelling. The presenter posed the question of how the law is affecting us in ways we don’t recognize. This is precisely the question I am trying to ask myself, since I do not have a typical pre-law major here at Columbia (Latin American and Caribbean Studies). I want to see how the law affects the communities I am from--for my International Law seminar, I am writing about the Caribbean Court of Justice (which, unfortunately like most people, I did not even know existed). The creation of this Court was one step toward the region’s agency in the legacy of law and empire, of imperial debt relationships. However, only four Caribbean countries thus far have ended the appellate jurisdiction of the Privy Council in Great Britain and handed it over to the Caribbean Court of Justice. The other CARICOM member states still use a British court as their appellate court of last resort. The law creates--or at least permits--debt, which ensnares the Caribbean. A movie called Life and Debt that I watched in a course last semester called The Modern Caribbean ends with a quote that has stuck with me since: “most natives are too poor to escape their lives; but they are too poor to live their own properly.”

 

Contributed by Arianna Faria Scott, Columbia College major in Political Science

CSSD Working Group Unpayable Debt launch of Caribbean Syllabus: Second Edition and Max Haiven’s "Art After Money, Money After Art"

On October 10, 2018, the working group, Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence and the New Global Economy, led by professors Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Sarah Muir, hosted a launch event for the Second Edition of the #NoMoreDebt: Caribbean Syllabus. The group also launched the book Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization by Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media, and Social Justice at Lakehead University.

The Unpayable Debt working group at the Center for the Study for Social Difference (CSSD) explores the role of debt in capitalist societies, and how indebtedness is mutually informed by histories of colonization. In May of 2018, the CSSD working group published the first ever resource to study debt and the Caribbean with the release of Caribbean Syllabus: Life and Debt in the Caribbean. The syllabus has been used internationally among scholars, artists, activists, and others, to stimulate conversation about the complex colonial and capitalist contexts that generate debt. The second edition contains three new sections that raise critical questions about indenture, law, and education. The syllabus has also been translated into French, Spanish, and Dutch, as a means of furthering expanding the conversation. The launch event provided a venue for artists, academics, and activists, to think through cycles of indebtedness and the question of “who owes what to whom”.

It was thus fitting that the event began with Max Haiven’s workshop “Rebel Currencies.” He spoke about artists and activists coalescing to challenge the current moment of financialization, in which everything has market value and our imaginative scope is oriented toward the production of more money. Professor Haiven discussed the commodification of art, but also, the potential for art to decrypt money. He explored several projects in which artists used money as a form of activism. One instance of this is Zachary Gough’s project, Bourdieux: A Social Currency. Gough brought his own crafted currency to academic and art conferences, which he distributed to all the participants. Whenever an act of social exchange occurs, participants are encouraged to exchange the currency. It’s a funny – and admittedly uncomfortable – process that reveals the economy of social capital, and the generation of power in exchanging things of value.

Next, we heard from the most recent contributors to the Caribbean Syllabus about their contributions. Tao Goffe, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, contributed a unit entitled, “Intimate Bonds and Bonded Labor: Indenture and Debt Peonage in the Caribbean.” This section explores Chinese indenture in the Caribbean, specifically thinking through intimacy, the afterlife, and media. Monica Jimenez, Assistant Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, provided unit eight of the syllabus, “The Role of Law in the Production of Debt.” This unit brings forth questions of the legacy of law and empire, and specifically, how the United States created an imperial debt relationship. Lastly, Jason Wozniak, Lecturer in Philosophy at San Jose State University, focused on education and debt. He argues that debt projects students into a non-democratic future that channels education into a “return investment paradigm.” In this addition to the syllabus, “Caribbean Education Debt”,  he explores how debt impacts formal and informal experiences of education in the Caribbean.

With these new additions, the Caribbean Syllabus: Second Edition now encompasses 18 units through which educators, activists, students, and artists can think through the colonial and capitalist lineages of debt in the Caribbean. It was wonderful seeing students and scholars alike exchanging ideas on the politics of debt.

Contributed by Laura Marissa Charney

First Women Creating Change Leadership Council Meeting of the 2018 - 2019 Academic Year

In advance of the Center for the Study of Social Difference’s (CSSD) Women Creating Change(WCC) five year anniversary roundtable on Thursday September 27th, the Women Creating Change Leadership Council (WCCLC) convened to review progress and discuss next steps. The WCCLC provides a critical link between the University’s faculty-led projects and  global business, academic, and civil society. It is comprised of individuals who are preeminent in the fields of business, law, government, nonprofit, social activism, and academia.

Present at the September 27th meeting were WCCLC Chair Ann Kaplan and fellow council members Annette Anthony, A’Lelia Bundles, Georgina Cullman, Melissa Fisher, Lois Perelson-Gross, Safwan Masri, Cynthia Moses-Manocherian, Alyson Neel, Philippa Portnoy, Samia Salfiti,Isobel Coleman, Jacki Zehner, and Davia Temin. Council Members Deborah Jackson and Selena Soo took part via telephone. CSSD Executive committee members who took part in the meeting included Director Marianne Hirsch, co-founder Jean Howard, Director of Development and External Relations Meera Ananth as well as Project Directors Victoria Rosner, Jennifer Dohrn, Wilmot James, and FrancesNegrón-Muntaner. Additional participants included Carolyn Ferguson, Robin Wiessman and Aly Zehner.

Professor Hirsch highlighted the significance of CSSD as a unique space of intellectual collaboration among the many schools within Columbia University that traditionally do not often work together.

The group reviewed the efforts of WCC working groups On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics and Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence and the New Global Economy. Members from On the Frontlines discussed their work with nurses as it relates to the Global Health Security Agenda and how female leaders are upscaling detection, prevention and response to health catastrophes. Professor Negrón-Muntaner, co-director of Unpayable Debt focused on, on-the ground activism, how women are affected by debt and how they are making changes in their communities.

Also addressed at the meeting were stories of impact. For example the Unpayable Debt working group has facilitated the creation of the Caribbean Syllabus, which provides a list of resources for teaching and learning about the current economic crisis in the Caribbean. This syllabus has seen thousands of downloads from across the world and has recently had its second edition #NoMoreDebt: Caribbean Syllabus released. Feminist educator and member of the working group Women Mobilizing Memory, Nicole Gervasio shared stories and insights from her participation that have influenced her methods of teaching and community building in the classroom.

Attendees concluded the meeting with a consensus on the importance and power of women’s narratives.

Currently the working groups sponsored by CSSD under the Women Creating Change idea-stream include Menstrual Health and Gender Justice, Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City, On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics, Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence (RGFGV), and Reframing Gendered Violence (RGV). Active working groups related to Imagining Justice, the second of CSSD’s overarching research themes, are Pedagogies of Dignity, Racial Capitalism, Queer Theory: Here, Now and Everywhere, Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture and Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence and the New Global Economy.

Contributed by Ayah Eldosougi 

Women Creating Change (WCC) Celebrates Fifth Anniversary

This September marked not only the ten year anniversary of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) but, the five year anniversary of CSSD’s project Women Creating Change (WCC), one of two streams of research and galvanization that engages distinguished feminist scholars from diverse fields throughout Columbia University who focus on contemporary global problems affecting women and on the roles women play in addressing these problems.

The roundtable event, Telling Women’s Stories: Creating Change, convened in celebration of WCC’s anniversary, took place on Thursday September 27th at the Columbia Club (Penn Club) in midtown Manhattan. It was moderated by WCC Leadership Council member and Columbia University trustee, A’Lelia Bundles and featured journalists and writers, Nina Berman, Margo Jefferson, Aly Neel and Rebecca Traister.

The night began with introductory remarks by Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger, a steadfast supporter of CSSD and WCC and CSSD’s Director Marianne Hirsch. Ann Kaplan, Chair of the Women Creating Change Leadership Council (WCCLC), was honored for her ardent support of CSSD and WCC.

Echoed throughout the night were the stories of women, with the acknowledgment of the power of what speaker Aly Neel referred to as, hyperlocal stories, personal oral histories of women, (particularly subaltern women) and the work these narratives do to disrupt the norm. Neel also emphasized the necessity of activating the youth toward action with accessible stories, which served as the catalyst for her recent endeavor, Girl Power, a children's book about pioneering women throughout Myanmar history.

Building off of the idea of hyperlocal stories, Nina Berman, documentary photographer and journalist, emphasized the importance of collaborative storytelling when telling stories around sexual violence and trauma. Traister, the author of the recently released book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger addressed both the costs and necessity of first person testimonies by women and the anger many women are feeling. Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist Margo Jefferson’s delved into the power dynamics at play for women in telling their stories.

In the wake of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault allegations against now Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, the roundtable served as a sort of catharsis for many in the room as both Hirsch and Bundles remarked in their comments. The conversation also converged around themes of female anger, solidarity and evoked the #MeToo movement and Anita Hill.

Currently the working groups sponsored by CSSD under the Women Creating Change idea-stream include Menstrual Health and Gender Justice, Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City, On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics, Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence (RGFGV), and Reframing Gendered Violence (RGV).  

See photos from the event here.

Contributed by Ayah Eldosougi 

Of Waves, Tides and (Feminist) Tsunamis: a Student Response to What We CAN Do When There’s Nothing To Be Done

The following was written in response to the tenth anniversary symposium of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD), held at The Forum at Columbia on September 28, 2018, by Mayte López, Graduate Teaching Fellow in the PhD Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILaC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY:

As I sit down to write this essay, Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. The government of the United States, a country that welcomed me over six years ago and that I call my home, has granted Kavanaugh a lifetime appointment that allows him to rule and legislate over women’s bodies. Our bodies. A man who has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, a man who has shown absolutely no respect for a woman’s body or will, a man-child whose only excuse for sexually assaulting a woman seems to be his incommensurate love of beer, now has the power to decide the future of legal abortion in this country and, possibly—most likely—overturn Roe vs. Wade. Lately, I’ve read multiple statements comparing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing to that of Anita Hill. “I believe survivors. I believe Christine Blasey Ford. And I still believe Anita Hill” can be read all over my protective social media bubble, the carefully —albeit unintendedly—crafted echo chamber I’ve built for myself over years of likes, loves, and unfollows. What scares me the most about that last sentence is the fact that when it comes to Dr. Blasey Ford, it’s not a matter of belief or credibility. People—senators—believed her. Her testimony was not considered untrue. It was considered, and this is what makes my spine shiver, unimportant. What the Senate is telling this woman, and all women for that matter, is that their government doesn’t care. Politics trumps human decency, and Donald Trump trumps all of us. “A girl has no name, a woman has no government.”

In light of these events, the phrase “What we can do when there’s nothing to be done,” proposed by the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia (CSSD) during their 10th Year Anniversary Conference, becomes even more meaningful. Can we do something? Is there really nothing to be done? I compose myself and recall Judith Butler’s intervention during the conference. Butler spoke about what it means to act in the midst of pessimism, and to keep that pessimism from becoming hopelessness. Radical transformation, she affirmed, starts incrementally and there is something to be said for momentum, for the continuing struggle of activism over time and with others.

So, what can we do? First, let me address—as was done during the opening remarks and throughout the conference—the problematic nature of that we. What does it mean, these days, to think about a collectivity? However problematic, and since I am especially concerned with women’s bodies today, and external decisions surrounding said bodies, I choose to embrace that we not only in that I am a woman, but in that I am that other marginalized and subjugated to the wishes (and “drinking games”) of white, rich, Ivy-league-educated men. I am also many other others, as Judith Butler’s invocation of #NiUnaMenos, the hashtag of the movement against gendered violence that has run through Latin America like a flame, reminds me. The movement was born in 2015 to protest feminicidio—the systematic killing of women— in Argentina, but the slogan actually has its origin in a poem by Mexican poet and activist Susana Chávez. The poem, written in 1995 in protest of Ciudad Juárez’s own appalling number of feminicidios, included the verse “Ni una muerta más” (Not one more [woman] dead). Chávez was a victim of feminicidio herself in 2011, and activists proposed the use of the slogan alluding to her poem to help fuel the movement.

As Butler stressed during her intervention in the conference, what’s most remarkable in these scenarios is that certain issues start to link with one another. Women, she said, are demanding the right to have abortions. Not the right to “choose,” as the time for euphemisms is now long gone. In Latin America, the debate around legal abortion is definitely making waves because of its narrative. The discussion now, stress the activists, is not whether women should abort, but whether abortion should be made safe and legal for all, as opposed to life-endangering and clandestine for the poor: women have always gotten abortions, but only some women can pay for the high costs of a covert and illegal surgery. It’s not only a women’s issue but a class issue. In Argentina, women—and men—understood this, and in August 2018 they protested and marched, took to the streets, and stood outside the Senate for hours, waiting for a vote to legalize abortion that was ultimately rejected. The protesters wore green handkerchiefs and clothing, which granted the movement the nickname “la marea verde” [The Green Tide]. After the vote was cast, la marea still stood outside the Senate, jumping up and down, repeating slogans, and dancing, only momentarily defeated: “It’s ok, we’ll win next year,” they said, while chanting “Se va a caer, se va a caer, el patriarcado se va a caer” [It’s going down, it’s going down, patriarchy is going down]. Indeed, unabashed by the results in Argentina, a few weeks later, on September 2018, another Green Tide took to the streets in Mexico —where I come from— to make very similar claims: Mexico’s own marea verde, wearing similar handkerchiefs, demands legal abortion nationwide —as it is legal in Mexico City—and for feminicidios to stop. The momentum Butler spoke of, with its multiple interlinked issues, is—it has to be—transnational and collective. 

 During the first panel of the CSSD Conference, Chilean performance artist and theater professor María José Contreras spoke of a “feminist tsunami,” and of the importance of the body as a preferred device to mobilize political critique. The bare chests of young women clad in personalized balaclavas, and the confirmation that these women had indeed achieved changes in the Chilean legislature, made the following speaker (as well as myself, and I would bet, many in the audience) feel like “just a woman in the world”. There was something profoundly powerful in those balaclavas, and in the women wearing them, their fists and hands raised, out in the streets making a case for their reproductive rights and against gendered violence. Their victory, their smiles, challenging our previous ideas of what was—what is— possible, seemed to imply that there is a lot we can do (when there’s nothing to be done). The fierce balaclavas, and the reference to a feminist “tsunami,” got me to thinking: how do we go from waves, to tides, to tsunamis? Movement, Butler affirmed, emerges in the course of struggle.

The Kavanaugh-Ford hearing, which had taken place on the day prior to the CSSD conference, was lingering in the air and was brought up by multiple speakers, including Butler herself, who made a brief but tension-relieving and laughter-provoking impersonation of Kavanaugh, much welcomed by the audience. A conference statement was written on the spot strongly opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation and was projected on the huge screen of the auditorium and, at the close of the conference, we stood in front of it for a picture that recorded our strong opposition to the confirmation as students, teachers, writers, artists, and others. Standing there, with my hand up high, clenched in a fist, I felt a tinge of movement, perhaps—dare I say it—a tiny wave. Now, much like the Green Tide standing outside the Argentinian Senate, we have lost. Again. So, to quote Butler once more, what does it means to act in the midst of pessimism? And how do we keep that pessimism from becoming hopelessness? I do not have the answers but perhaps we should take a cue from the women jumping up and down in Buenos Aires after the Senate had cast a vote against their reproductive rights. Crisis, journalist Masha Gessen pointed out during the conference, is a time of opportunity. Perhaps the answer lies, as Butler suggested, in transnational collective movement emerging in the course of continued struggle. For waves and tides to become tsunamis, we must not stop moving. “Se va a caer, se va a caer, el patriarcado se va a caer”.

Contributed by Mayte López.

Introduction to “Arts of Intervention” panel featuring Ricardo Dominguez, Sama Alshaibi, Miya Masaoka, and Saidiya Hartman

The following is the prelude by Carol Becker (Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia) to the roundtable discussion “Arts of Intervention” at the anniversary conference of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD), “What We Can Do When There’s Nothing To Be Done: Strategies for Change,” which was held on September 28, 2018 at The Forum at Columbia University, New York, New York:

The Gesture

Artists live in the world as citizen guides and witnesses, carefully charting human and social complexity. Because they pay close attention to evolving subtleties of the species and the natural environment, they have a deep commitment to reflecting and affecting the contemporary understanding of our condition. Their work often predicts what is to come, not because artists are unusually prescient but because they live intensely in the present—observing, responding, and contemplating. As a result, their work often gestures to the urgency of issues manifesting in the moment, threatening the species and the planet now and in the future. What does it mean to look closely, to listen seriously, to notice what others might not, and then to question unrelentingly what you are seeing and hearing?

As intensely as artists monitor the present reality, they also cultivate their imaginations. Therefore, they see the possibilities of potential systems of thought that do not as yet exist––the ways in which the world could be different and better for all living creatures. Thus artists tend to align with those in the progressive arena who imagine a world moving toward a greater good, one without inequity and oppression.

And because artists are deeply committed to personal freedom of expression as a basic right, they also tend to be irreverent and, at times, defiant against that which feels overly institutionalized and restrictive. Because of their commitment to the imagination, artists start with the premise that all that stands in the way of human freedom and well-being can be and should be rethought, rebuilt, and rearranged. Or, as poet Terrance Hayes writes in his poem “For Brothers of the Dragon,” “Why was the imagination invented, if not to remake?”

And as specific as art might be to a particular moment, culture, and conflict, when it goes deep enough into the uniqueness of a situation, it inevitably touches something bigger than itself that incorporates difference and moves us simultaneously to an understanding of our shared humanity. This understanding is very significant, because when we refuse to acknowledge our collective humanness, we then are able to objectify others. The more capable of objectification we are, the less likely we are to exercise compassion or understanding or to engage in humane action for all.

If successful, art is experiential, eliciting a sensorial or emotional response. Even when abstract, issue oriented, or functional, its unique form allows the work to reason with our sensibilities, to make us understand the world through our bodies as well as through our minds.

Within this framework of lived experience are the stories we tell each other about our lives. Getting to common ground—without ignoring, depleting, and denying the inevitable differences of history, culture, and ideology—is the consequence of negotiating form, something that artists understand very well. Artists are able to use technique, technology, and skill to contain this complexity of human experience, whether within the structure of a play, a novel, a poem, or a memoir; within the visual conceits of painting, sculpture, performance, installation, or intervention; within the myriad forms of musical composition, sound art, theater, dance, or the range of filmic structures; or within the new possible forms afforded by evolving digital innovation. All allow us to contain the shared depth, breadth, complexity of emotion, desire, lived lives, successes, and failures of the species. Rarely does someone create artwork to hide it in a drawer. Art for the most part is made to exist in the public sphere––to be read, heard, seen, sung, experienced, and shared with as large an audience as possible. As such, it is always a public statement made to communicate, to stir up, to elicit emotion, to provoke clear thinking, and, at times, to solve a specific problem.

Artists and designers increasingly define their process by what has been called social practice: the desire and ability to intervene in the public sphere. These practitioners have been in the vanguard of helping to make visible such issues as race, class, gender, migration, social justice, public concerns with Big Data, the reemergence of fascism, and Climate Change.

Working across forms, these four artists, writers, thinkers, and practitioners—Ricardo Dominguez, Sama Alshaibi, Miya Masaoka, and Saidiya Hartman—manifest aspects of such intentions. In their own ways, they each tackle complex social issues, utilizing advanced technologies as well as the most originary forms of narrative to situate the human voice in particular landscapes.

Thinking through art is a utopian process. Once art is in the public sphere, its ideas slowly become recognizable and acceptable, as they wait for the time when thought can manifest in action. In this sense, art, which is the result of great passion and urgency, also integrates patience and duration.

Contributed by Carol Becker

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice Working Group Launches with Expert Panel: Menstruation is Having its Moment – How Can Scholars Engage?

On September 20, 2018, the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights sponsored the launch of a new CSSD working group: Menstrual Health and Gender Justice. The event featured an expert panel addressing some of the most pressing questions related to menstrual health. 

Panelists provided insights into how the working group can address and engage with the recent surge in public interest surrounding menstruation in their research.

The panel brought together various perspectives: established scholars and new voices, birds-eye views on ongoing developments and insights from communities, socio-medical and cultural perspectives on menstruation. Inga Winkler, the director of the working group, led five panelists and experts in the field in discussing the methods, opportunities, and risks involved in generating sustainable, evidence-based outcomes and in challenging common misconceptions of menstruation. Both the panelists and attendees of the launch event offered professional and personal perspectives on the current menstrual movement, its history and significance, and the potential ways in which the working group can contribute to meaningful, inclusive change.

  • Nancy Reame from the Columbia School of Nursing challenged the idea that menstruation is only now having its moment and drew our attention to research and advocacy on the Toxic Shock Syndrome outbreak in the 1980s.

  • Norma Swenson, one of the co-founders of Our Bodies, Ourselves, provided advice on how to develop the current moment into a long-term movement for women’s health.

  • Vanessa Paranjothy, an Obama Foundation Scholar and co-founder of Freedom Cups stressed the importance of listening to women and following their lead when working with communities.

  • Trisha Maharaj, a graduate student in Human Rights Studies, shared research on attitudes towards menstruation amongst Hindu women in Trinidad. She challenged the conventional wisdom that cultural and religious practices often contribute to stigma based on her findings that women in Trinidad do not perceive them as stigmatizing.

  • Chris Bobel from UMass Boston cautioned us that the menstrual health space is driven by assertions and assumptions that are not yet properly explored. She witnesses a heavy focus on providing products to the detriment of addressing underlying issues of institutionalized and embodied shame about menstruation.

Among the diverse perspectives present, the panel agreed that several issues are integral for moving the discussion on menstrual health forward, including: (1) promoting menstrual literacy and body literacy; (2) supporting scholarship aimed to fill knowledge gaps; (3) addressing stigma associated with menstruation; and (4) involving and encouraging collaboration with diverse groups, sectors, and movements. Moving forward, the Menstrual Health and Gender Justice working group will engage in critically evaluating existing developments in the field of menstrual studies, contributing to the body of research and sharing knowledge.

If you would like to get updates and news from the Menstrual Health and Gender Justice Working Group, please email Michelle at mc4225@columbia.edu.

Contributed by Sydney Amoakoh, Michelle Chouinard and Inga Winkler.

Professor Inga Winkler Speaks at UN Event on Menstrual Health

On July 11, 2018, Simavi and WSSCC hosted a panel discussion during the UN’s High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, about “Putting Menstrual Health on the 2030 Agenda,” which featured Institute for the Study of Human Rights professor Dr. Inga Winkler as both the keynote speaker and a panelist. Dr. Winkler is director of the Menstrual Health and Gender Justice working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University.

In her keynote address, Dr. Winkler emphasized the importance of removing Menstrual Hygiene Management  (MHM) strictly from the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector in order to unpack and address issues around menstruation at all levels. She stressed the need to look at the numerous ways that people are affected by menstruation and how menstruation is directly linked to many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on the 2030 agenda, such as Good Health and Well-Being, Quality Education, Gender Equality, Clean Water and Sanitation, Decent Work and Economic Growth, and Responsible Consumption and Production.

Dr. Winkler stressed the importance of including women and girls in the discussion, especially those who are traditionally marginalized or excluded. The range of experiences individuals have with menstruation should be addressed in order to leave no one behind. For example, indigenous women, women with disabilities, refugee and migrant women and girls, homeless individuals, incarcerated women, and the LGBTQI community all face overlapping forms of discrimination and are often left out of the MHM conversation.

Dr. Winkler also noted the large role that religion and culture play in regards to menstrual practices, but that it should remain up to the menstruating individual whether or not to partake in them. In this way these individuals maintain their agency, which is the driving force behind the SDGs.

Written by Human Rights graduate students Trisha Maharaj and Tori Miller.

Cinnamon Bloss: "Consumers, Citizens, and Crowds in the Age of Precision Medicine"

Professor Cinnamon Bloss (UC San Diego) gave a fascinating talk for the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference on February 15, 2018.

At the center of her talk was the problem of diffusion of medical innovation. This problem is not a new one. There is longstanding research on processes of adoption of innovation. Physicians as well as patients have historically hesitated to experiment with innovative technologies, and issues of privacy and trust have persisted. Inequality and distributive injustice has also traditionally been a problem as it is often wealthy individuals who enjoy innovative technologies long before they become standard therapies. A few historical examples are Serum treatment for pneumonia in the 1920s, Arsenic treatment for syphilis in the 1930s, Chemotherapy for varied cancer in the 1960s, and Experimental HIV treatment in the 1980s.

Professor Bloss engages with these complex and longstanding questions in her research in relation to Precision Medicine (PM). Her work addresses the considerable bioethical challenges that come with the rise of new technological innovation and practices of PM. And her analysis spans three analytical levels: individual, systemic, and societal.

What is remarkable and important about Professor Bloss’s work is that while many researchers take for granted that issues such as “privacy,” “trust,” and “participation” are challenges to PM, Professor Bloss adopts a critical perspective in trying to understand what those terms even mean in the arena of PM.

Instead of taking concepts from bioethics as given, she builds on previous work to empirically investigate the current bioethical dilemmas of PM. Her work is oriented to empirically understand the various norms, expectations and challenges entangled in the notion of “privacy” for patients. In what specific ways does ‘privacy’ affect trust and patient participation? And what are the current expectation of patients from PM?

Professor Bloss also attempts to understand the specific views of physicians towards PM and the specific gaps common to both clinical practice and PM. What motivates practitioners to turn to PM, and what obstacles prevent the diffusion of new technologies? On point of consideration is that transformation in the position of the FDA towards distribution of direct to consumer test results is especially important in shaping the current climate.

The significance of this research is in emphasizing that new technologies of PM transform the traditional concerns and problems for researchers, doctors, regulators and patients. We must continue to follow the evolution of notions and practices of ‘privacy’, ‘trust’, ‘regulation’ or ‘protection’ to understand current events.

In this context, Professor Bloss’s work on Direct to Consumer (DTC) strategies in PM is especially important, as it shows how the field of bioethics and its fundamental challenges are being transformed in a new healthcare economy.

In her research, Professor Bloss examines the American Gut Project to try and understand both new strategies for raising money for research (with the decrease in availability of public funding for research) and new models of patient consumerism. What drives Americans to participate in microbiome research? Which demographics are most likely to participate? What types of result do Americans expect? What if our ability to interpret the data and articulate its clinical implications is very limited? Are participants only interested in recognitions for their contribution to research or do they expect the data to help them manage their health proactively? And what will happen when we are able to interpret results and link microbiome profiles to clinical risks? Among other legal and ethical challenges, we might consider: would we have to report such results to employers and insurers?

Professor Bloss’s work opens up new avenues in understanding the new healthcare economy based on DTC and PM and their unique challenges. We are grateful that she so kindly and expertly discussed these topics with our PMEPC graduate fellows and the public at large.

Contributed by Moran Levy

Dr. Susan Markens talks about ethics and genetic counseling with the CSSD/PM&S Precision Medicine group

On January 22, 2018, the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture CSSD/PM&S working group welcomed Dr. Susan Markens (CUNY-Lehman College) for its first talk of the semester, titled The Genomic Revolution, Genetic Counselors, and “Doing Ethics.” Dr. Markens presented her qualitative findings based on her research about the perspectives of genetic counselors towards the increasing availability and use of genetic science and testing.

Dr. Markens focuses on studying how the new advances in genetic science are translated and perceived, particularly from the point of view of genetic counselors. She presented the following questions during her talk: 1) What are the perspectives of genetic counselors on ethical issues emerging from recent advances in genetic technology? and 2) What do they consider to be their goals and professional responsibilities?

The talk presented data primarily derived from forty-two qualitative interviews, the vast majority of which were with board certified genetic counselors. Additional supporting materials drew from attendance at professional conferences, webinars, and talks, and also newspapers and other publications.

Genetic Counseling as a Profession

Historian Alexandra Minna Stern defined the birth and development of the genetic counseling profession as a "quiet revolution,” in particular starting after the establishment of the first degree in genetic counseling at Sarah Lawrence College in 1969 and later of a certification exam in 1981. By the end of 2017, the United States had a total of 37 accredited programs and over 4,000 certified genetic counselors.

Previously, genetic counselors primarily worked in prenatal counseling and pediatrics, and their role is now expanding to topics related to cancer and multiple overlapping areas. Cancer counseling has grown alongside the scientific advances in the last decades, becoming more and more popular in an industry setting. Genetic counselors play a pivotal role in terms of translating information for patients, having both a background in the sciences and other psychosocial aspects. "Non-directedness" is considered to be among the tenets of the profession, but not without controversy, given professional's different existing approaches, fields of expertise, and perspectives. Nonetheless, patient autonomy always remains as the cardinal value.

In Dr. Markens’s interviews, many genetic counselors highlighted the uniqueness of their profession: one interviewee noted that "most other professions will recommend we just tell them what is available" alongside "benefits, limitations, and risks,” whereas genetic counselors describe themselves as providers of information, allowing patients to make decisions in an informed way. From a patient-centered perspective, their agenda consists in learning information about their patients, providing them information about genetic testing, and answering any questions that may arise.

Advances in and Impact of Genetic Testing and Knowledge: Views of Genetic Counselors

Overall, genetic counselors are enthusiastic about the advances in genetic science, calling it “positive,” “very exciting,” and “important.” In describing their motivation in pursuing their profession, one interviewee mentioned “empower patients to understand more about decisions” as one of their primary goals. At the same time, genetic counselors are aware of the complications introduced by such overwhelming “availability of information;” it is “frequently anxiety provoking,” leading to a “long line of testing,” “ambiguous results,” and “limited information.” As the stress behind “knowing the little things” accumulates, it “takes the fun out of pregnancy.”

Dr. Markens points to genetic counselors' nuanced understanding of pros and cons as “reflective ambivalence.” Where is the line between giving the “right amount” of information, and “just too much?” In being part of the process, genetic counselors see both sides of the coin, mentioning episodes in which they regretted providing additional information in talking with their patients. “Maybe we are testing too much given what we know right now,” commented one interviewee.

Dr. Markens reports genetic counselors pointing to the need to have solid justifications prior to ordering tests. There is a tendency to “just go ahead and test,” and some interviewees observed that it feels they are just ordering tests without thinking about it. As results come back with incidental findings, genetic counselors find themselves wishing they had not ordered as many tests. Often, results are unclear: “that level of uncertainty for people can be jarring. And for me as a clinician, I don’t like it either,” since it's “really hard to provide any level of reassurance to a patient.” All interviewees firmly confirmed that they are not “anti-testing,” but they expressed their efforts to grapple with the implications of their work.

The Role of Genetic Counselors in Private Industry

In highlighting the interaction between genetic counselors and the private industry for genetic tests, Dr. Markens introduced themes that highlighted 1) the role private industry plays in bringing genetic tests to market for consumers, 2) the impact that industry has had on consumers’ perceptions and choices for testing, 3) the interplay between academic channels of communication and clinical genetic counselors, 4) the implications of being a genetic counselor in the industry, and 5) how the growth in the private genetic testing industry impacts the expectations of both consumers and genetic counselors.

The impact of private industry upon the availability of testing for non-professionals has been of growing concern among genetic counselors. Specifically, there is a disparity between informed testing, with limited knowledge, and making informed choices for testing. The genetic counselors note that this ill-informed movement is driven by the industry's push for testing among all consumers (“there is a lot of push to get it [genetic tests] out there”). This has led to the transformation of genetic testing as a “part of the routine care” instead of an option under circumstances where the results would be informative for medical decisions.

Dr. Markens highlights how this push from the genetic testing industry has not been unidirectional, but rather has been in response to a growing demand from lay consumers. This interplay between the growing industry and consumer demand has been expressed in interactions between consumers and genetic counselors. The counselors, limited in number, have been inundated with demands for testing, often without consult; as one counselor notes “people want to do all this genetic testing without genetic counseling, and they maybe don’t really know how it could impact them emotionally and financially.” Due to the limited number of genetic counselors available, questions regarding how to inform all potential consumers and how to educate providers have come up in these interviews. The disparity between the need for clinical genetic counselors and the demand, as noted by the interviewees, is made more substantial by the rising demand for the counselors in industry.

In attending professional conference and webinars targeted for genetic counselors, Dr. Markens presented her observations about how the private industry interacts with counselors in these settings. Unlike other social science conferences, Dr. Markens noted that the resources allocated for the professional conference where genetic counselors would be present were primarily funded by private industry. Additionally, she observed that the drivers of research in the area of genetic testing was often from private industry groups and funded by pharmaceutical and testing companies instead of academic researchers.

Building from her observation at professional conferences and narratives collected through interviews, Dr. Markens highlights the implications of being a genetic counselor in private industry. Specifically, the increased demand from private industry has led to the creation of something akin to a pipeline between genetic counselors in training and industry jobs. Although not the initial goal of many counselors in training, “people are getting hired right away, and clinical positions are open because they are going into industry.” Dr. Markens notes that this has led to the creation of a significant paucity of clinical genetic counselors and the narratives from other genetic counselors has mirrored this, noting that the private industry counselors offer their services for counseling when there are not enough counselors available. This exchange brought up concerns about the conflict of interest between parties, where the industry counselor’s alliance may be to the company and not the consumer. In contrast to these perspectives by clinical genetic counselors, those counselors in industry see their role as being essential to be able to inform and change the industry practices from within.

In bridging the lessons learned across these narratives, Dr. Markens presented her findings on how to manage the expectations of all those involved in the genetic testing process. There was a resounding agreement across interviews that there is a need to ground the field in the research and actuality of what we know and do not know. Building from the perspectives on the growth of knowledge about genetics and genetic testing, there is a real need to “manage our expectations of what the testing is going to give us.” This has been most notably impacting the process of informed consent, specifically, seeking to clarify what it is that the consumer would want to know about the process and potential outcomes. Dr. Markens highlighted a “need to change our focus from the definition of ethical principles in their abstract form to looking at their practical application,” such that the realities of testing are no longer a hypothetical scenario, but rather a reality that is present every day in the lives of genetic counselors.

Follow Up Questions and Discussions

At the close of Dr. Markens’s presentation, the audience, representing a diverse group of practitioners, scientists, and members of the larger academic community, was left with many thoughts and questions. In this discussion were encompassed questions about the future of the field and how those still in training can be a part of the movement to revitalize the core precepts of genetic counseling. There was a call for more diversity in the gender and race of genetic counselors and a clarity in the training provided to instill confidence in counselors to inform not only the consumer, but also others within the medical profession.

Some way in which these changes are currently being implemented involve genetic counselors being the ones to sign-off on the types of tests that can be requested as well as providing training and intervention to physicians to better inform them of the choices they have for requesting tests. In reflection, the overall tone and temperament of those in the room was of hope and a willingness to be creators of change in this field.

Contributed by Natalia Romano Spica and Amar Mandavia

Kadija Ferryman: “Fairness in Precision Medicine”

Kadija Ferryman’s talk on November 30, 2017 for the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture CSSD working group drew from her post-doctoral project, “Fairness in Precision Medicine,” a study on which she is co-PI with danah boyd at the Data and Society Institute.

The question that motivates Ferryman’s work is: How do ethical and moral frames change the way we understand health data and outcome? Using content analyses of policy documents, observations of conferences, a mapping of major precision medicine projects, and interviews with 21 experts, Ferryman honed in on two sets of biases that various stakeholders recognized: embedded biases and biases in outcome. Regarding embedded biases, experts were concerned about biases in sampling of research data such as electronic health records. For biases in outcome, the stakeholders interviewed were worried about how precision medicine can exacerbate already existing inequalities.

Crucially, Ferryman emphasized that these biases should be thought about in relation to genomic data, but also the various data types that precision medicine relies on, such as electronic medical records, the “Internet of Medical Things,” and mobile and digital technologies. As such, Ferryman argued that those concerned about precision medicine should pay attention to discussions in “big data” and “algorithmic bias,” and that bioethics and “data ethics” could learn from each other.

In the meeting of the Precision Medicine working group the next day, several themes emerged from our discussion:

Correcting for Bias
A question raised during the meeting touched on how experts who recognize that bias exists can come up with strategies to correct these biases. For example, policy makers and researchers worried about diversity in precision medicine have made the recruitment of minority subjects a centerpiece of All of Us. This is also an instance of agreement on the existence of bias between different experts in precision medicine. Thus, finding more areas of agreement between different stakeholders is crucial in building the alliance of political capital, policy know-how, and technical expertise necessary to correct for biases that may arise with the introduction of precision medicine.

Different Data Types
From the standpoint of social scientists and humanists, the inclusion of different types of data in precision medicine efforts is definitely welcomed, as decades of public health research has recognized the importance of environmental and social factors in shaping health outcomes. Nonetheless, important questions here remain regarding the ability of precision medicine to reconcile the characteristics of different data types. For instance: How do biomedical researchers view these types of more qualitative data versus more quantifiable and “scientific” data types? How are different types of evidence evaluated by scientists? Relatedly, the work of linking disparate data types and recognizing patterns between them requires complex technical expertise. As such, more work should be devoted to thinking through how to integrate these various types of data to create a precise, but complete picture of an individual’s health.

Ethics in the Health Industry: “Precisely” Where Are We Headed?
Health and the data it generates are increasingly commodified. From private tech companies to healthcare providers, precision medicine ushers in greater opportunities to wield personalized health data for commercial use. This raises parallel concerns regarding the ethical use and handling of our personal information. From targeted Facebook shopping ads to Netflix recommendations, we trade our information and data privacy for access to services and convenience. Mass personalization at its current stage generally produces innocuous, if eerie, results. We retain a sense of autonomy and choice to partake in these services and disengage if we choose. As health and genomic personalization approaches arrive in the healthcare space, however, the ability to opt-out becomes much more constrained. Health is foundational in enabling meaningful engagement and participation in society. Greater integration of individual data into the healthcare system provides an opportunity for better care, but brings into question the genuine ability to opt-out of such a system in the future.

With the rise in personal health data spurred by the “Internet of Medical Things” (IoMT) and devices, we are afforded insight into not only genetic profiles, but behavioral, lifestyle, and environmental dimensions of individuals. Their implications extend beyond clinical contexts. Employers, not unreasonably, seek employee health data in pursuit of optimizing efficiency and a more productive workforce. More sinisterly, employment discrimination based on health is the next addition to contemporary concerns that include disability, race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Other ethical concerns flow more directly from technology and automated algorithms we increasingly use to analyze data. Our artificial intelligence and neural networks pick up the deeply ingrained racial and gender prejudices concealed within patterns of language, imagery, and social cues in our datasets. If we are not vigilant about policing these embedded beliefs, algorithmic bias may result in and reinforce discriminatory and exclusionary practices.

Involving the Community and Public Voice
Part of guarding against bias and discrimination involves engaging the communities directly impacted by this research. This may come in the form of Institutional Review Board (IRB) assessments or consulting local Community Board representatives drawn from the affected population. Even the selection of chosen representatives to give voice to a community, however, can be fraught with complications. How are such representatives selected -- by appointment or election, and by whom? Are those who end up on the Community Board truly representative of the community’s views? What are the power dynamics and hierarchies within that community influencing who is selected? In any structure, the intricacies of human relational and power dynamics play a tangible and meaningful presence, impacting the strength of community voice in discussion and decision-making. We need to be cognizant of such complexities when implementing structures and ensure they embody the representative democratic principles we value.

While the day-to-day responsibilities of IRB members largely involve checking off applications, on the macroscale, the arc and pattern of their decisions set precedents. As Ferryman poignantly questioned in discussing her role on the IRB board, “Are we the ethical conscience of a project?” A concern present in these circles is that passing IRB review or consulting Community Board representatives may become an ethics “check-off,” rather than a genuine partnership in understanding and appreciating the potential impact of their research on populations. We want and encourage research investigators, however, to consult ethics reviews and boards, recognizing they may not have the expertise to deal with these issues. “Seeking ethical assistance” is instinctive behavior we want to standardize in future precision medicine research.

As AI and health technology increasingly infiltrate daily life outside clinical contexts and the definition of health data is expanding, the modern role of bioethics may also need to evolve and cross traditional disciplines. Precision medicine is a collaborative effort that requires multiple perspectives. If this discussion imparted one actionable recommendation, it is that the scientific fields must call upon their ethical counterparts. Ethics is not an ancillary component of precision medicine, but a fundamental one in actualizing our communal vision for precision medicine.

Building Public Trust and Responsibility
The success of the All of Us study and other human genomic research requires the generous contribution of personal health and genomic data from individuals. This partnership between the public and science is needed to realize the network effects of a robust genetic database, and usher in a new model of precision healthcare that generations will benefit from. Building public trust is critical to these efforts, and without it, achieving a precision medicine approach will be a long and arduous process. While the U.S. culture naturally lends itself towards great suspicion of state power in these contexts, government imposes desirable safety regulations and constraints on profit-maximizing corporations. Designing ethical guidelines and a comprehensive regulatory landscape is important to enable proper oversight.

Conclusion: Ethics as a Partnership
Our unfolding discussion on the array of challenges that precision medicine poses increasingly points towards a more active and potent role of modern ethics in both industry and academic research. Precision medicine and our advancing abilities to arrange massive amounts of data herald great promises for our capacity to improve human health, behavior, and lifestyles. We must ensure ethical and regulatory safeguards keep pace with these abilities and align them with our core values on equity, fairness, privacy, autonomy, etc. Protecting these rights and evolving policy to reflect these ethical principles is key to ensuring our society does not stray onto a dystopic path.

Contributed by Larry Au and Jade H. Tan

Reframing Gendered Violence presented "Gender and the Technologies of State Violence" in November

On November 16, 2017, the CSSD working group Reframing Gendered Violence presented "Gender and the Technologies of State Violence: Innocence-Disposability-Resilience" in the Case Lounge of Jerome Greene Hall at Columbia Law School, along with the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law.

“The Reframing Gendered Violence project seeks to engage critically with the terms, assumptions, and policies that have underwritten an outpouring of attention and activism over the last couple of decades on violence against women and gender-based violence,” explained project co-director Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwiser Professor of Social Science, as she introduced speakers Sherene Razack, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, and Miriam Ticktin.

In keeping with the objectives articulated by Abu-Lughod, “Gender and the Technologies of State Violence” offered several compelling approaches to the problem of gender-based violence. The sixth installment of the two-year Reframing Gendered Violence project within the Women Creating Change initiative at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, it was co-sponsored by the Dean of the Humanities and the Columbia Global Centers.

Sherene Razack, Department of Gender Studies at UCLA, opened the panel with a paper entitled “Where Is Settler Colonialism In Analyses Of Gender Violence?” “How do you analyze the violence that comes at indigenous women, remembering the fact of settler colonialism?” she asked. “And how do male colonizers come to know themselves through violent encounters with indigenous women?”

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Law School, Hebrew University, approached similar questions in the context of Israeli settler colonialism in her paper “Should State Violence Against School Girls Be Called Gender Based Violence?” Pairing the testimony of Palestinian school girls with photographs of their harassment by Israeli soldiers, she showed how state violence can also manifest as gendered violence.

Elaborating on the insights of Razack and Kevorkian, Miriam Ticktin, Department of Anthropology, New School University, concluded the panel with a paper titled, “Would Getting Rid Of The Concept Of Innocence Enable Us To Address Gendered And Racist Violence?” “Innocence has moved to the center of political life today,” argued Ticktin. And yet, “only some people in some places get noticed when innocence is what draws our attention...Ideas and images of innocence and the moral authority they engender have a long history of actually hurting the people they intend to help.”

The Reframing Gendered Violence project will continue on January 25 with a panel on “Interrogating culture-based explanations for violence against women.”

Contributed by Liza McIntosh

CSSD Project on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence Convenes Workshop in Amman

A project of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence” (RGFGV), held a two-day workshop in September to explore and debate critical developments in the global framing of gender-based violence. The participants were a mix of anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, legal scholars, development professionals, and women’s rights advocates all working on violence, feminist advocacy, and representations of Muslims and Islam. They drew on their research to address the guiding question: What role does religion—and particularly Islam—play in naming, framing, and governing violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV)? Six themes structured the panels: Framing Islam, The Politics of Experience, Challenging Media Frames, Placing and Misplacing Blame, Pressures on Feminist Governance/ Strategies of Women’s Activism, and Reflections on Activism on the Ground.

Combating gender based violence (GBV) has emerged as a powerful agenda in international governance, national politics, and feminist and queer activism across many contexts. Dominant narratives about gender and GBV in certain regions assume that religion, often cloaked in the language of “culture” or “ethnic difference,” plays an important role. Continuing a tradition in projects at CSSD, RGFGV brought together critical thinkers and researchers working in the Middle East and South Asia, two regions where this narrative association is especially strong. They tackled issues as diverse as “child marriage” debates in Bangladesh (Siddiqi), controversies in India over women’s entry to shrines (Contractor), the politics of women’s activist organizations and influence of international agencies in now sectarian Iraq (Ali), Jordan (Ghosheh), and besieged Gaza (Hammami), reporting on gender violence in revolutionary Egypt (El-Rifae) and Occupied East Jerusalem (Shalhoub-Kevorkian), legal struggles over rape law in Jordan (Al-Khadra, Aziz), personal meanings of sexual violence for political prisoners in Iran (Talebi), the targeting of Muslim minorities in Europe (Shackle, Syeed), and even the role of GBV in U.S. Executive Orders and the counterterrorism industry (Volpp, Abu-Lughod).

Moving beyond the assumption that GBV is a universal phenomenon, the group historicized the production, applications, and implications of the term. When and how did GBV gain traction as the highly productive, powerful global concept it is today? In what ways does it bring into focus violence against certain bodies or by certain bodies while removing other violence and perpetrators from the scene? A central concern for the group was looking at what violence (and by whom) is not considered GBV. Many of the papers and discussions addressed these questions by carefully interrogating how the concept operates under specific formations of state violence that play out in the contemporary global political economy. Violence that occurs under settler colonialism or under regimes of state economic or military violence are rendered invisible by current definitions of GBV. How does blaming culture or religion for violence contribute to this invisibility?

Two of the presentations showed starkly how religion, and particularly Islam, has been implicated in staging a particular understanding of what constitutes GBV so that it can be deployed by wider geo-political projects. In January 2017, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” often referred to as “the Muslim ban.” Leti Volpp analyzed the implications of its identification of “honor killings” as a problematic practice by “foreign nationals” and the mandate to collect data on cases labeled as such. Concurrently, women are being called to engage in countering violent extremism (CVE) efforts. Lila Abu-Lughod explored the way the global counterterrorism industry paints (Muslim) women as both the victims of extremism and uniquely positioned to combat it within their own communities, giving rise to demands for gender mainstreaming and inclusion in a deeply problematic enterprise.

The disciplinary and professional diversity of the working group led to intense discussion of the narratives and framing of GBV and its relationship to Islam, revealing surprising commonalities across contexts and sparking intellectual synergies. Three Media Fellows had been selected from an international pool to join the RGFGV project. Before setting off on their individual reporting research in the region--in Egypt, Djibouti, and Erbil, the journalists participated in the workshop. Discussing problems of reporting on aspects of gender or Islam in the Middle East and Europe, they gave concrete examples they had faced in terms of “framing” the issues; a central theme that emerged in the workshop. Their professional experiences showed how American and European media standards constrain and drive the narratives that get media exposure, creating dilemmas especially when reporting on GBV. For example, covering a positive story on Muslim women can end up reproducing Orientalist assumptions in the realm of public opinion.

Rema Hammami, an anthropologist who faced similar problems representing domestic violence in the Middle East offered her own “how to report on GBV” list: individualize specific men as perpetrators; treat horror stories as unique; highlight women’s agency and homegrown solutions; show cases of modernity as the problem and tradition offering solutions. Others added: show how the category and many of the practices that fall under GBV are tied to contemporary state institutions, political economic conditions, and dynamics such as war-induced migration.

The varied backgrounds of the workshop participants also led to a consensus that exploring governance and resource distribution are key to understanding the global GBV agenda. Why do issues suddenly surface as resourced research questions? How are academic studies, activism, and governmental concern shaped by geopolitical developments? Who are the players and the experts? Who is not served by these agendas? Mapping the emergence of what Abu-Lughod called securofeminists in the counterterrorism industry or exposing the shadowy forces backing the U.S. Republican obsession with “honor killing” provides evidence of how feminists and politicians are profiting, politically and financially, from conjoining Islamophobia and GBV. In contexts of wars and occupation, resources assigned to “saving Muslim women” have often led to increased militarization with harmful consequences for women and others, including the suppression of dissent, the ahistoricization and de-contextualization of GBV and the undermining of local women activists. Hammami’s analysis focused on how international humanitarianism privileges resources for anti-GBV pedagogy amid the destruction and destitution of Gaza enabling it to colonize local activisms, misrepresenting activists’ calls to the world while undermining more relevant local projects. Her account provided sobering evidence of how the global GBV agenda can place “off-limits” urgent demands for political justice and transformation by populations subjected to acute forms of state violence.

A political economy of fear that dehumanizes certain populations according to their religious, racial, or cultural backgrounds shapes many of the contexts of violence in the regions the workshop discussed. This political economy of fear justifies material resources that fund the global GBV agenda, embedding racism, sectarianism, and imperial interests in too many of the programs meant to combat gender violence. Cross-regional discussion of humanitarian GBV, the NGO-ization of gender issues, and the politics of international aid revealed how political violence gets occluded by the human rights framework in which GBV and VAW are situated. Local development practitioners, legal advocates, and activists in the group (Aziz, Haram, Ghandour, Ghosheh) gave disturbing evidence of the influence of donor culture in the work they are attempting to do. They insisted on the agency of actors on the ground and detailed the complex, and often contradictory, political, theoretical, and structural issues they must negotiate.

Sara Ababneh drew attention to the ways feminist methodology, active listening, and attentiveness to experiences of women and girls could contribute to more robust definitions of GBV. The position of the girl child was given careful attention. How do historical and present contexts of colonization dictate legal and social policies to protect her or to oppress her? In Bangladesh, Dina Siddiqi described the way donors and local feminists may, in the name of protection or productivity, be undermining girls’ sexual agency. In Occupied East Jerusalem, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian demonstrated, the sacralized theology of the Israeli state frames girls as security threats in order to justify bodily harm and suppression of their rights. In Jordan, legal advocates have been debating the merits of laws about marrying one’s rapist, given the structure of current alternatives. To what extent should the voices of girls and women be used to define and redefine GBV?

Participants were exhilarated by the honest critical exchange of experiences, ideas, and knowledge during this workshop. They shared a commitment to advancing understanding of the challenges faced by those who feel the urgency of addressing gender violence. The workshop closed with two memorable activities: invitations to a private viewing of Widad Kawar’s collection of Palestinian and Jordanian women’s dress at Tiraz and a dinner hosted by Nissreen Haram to introduce the group to the wider dynamic scene in Amman of lawyers, artists, scholars, politicians, activists, social philanthropists, and entrepreneurs.

Supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, RGFGV partnered with the Columbia Global Center | Middle East, Amman for this workshop. CSSD projects on Women Creating Change are committed to internationalizing scholarship and knowledge. Previous projects such as Women Mobilizing Memory, Gender and the Global Slum, and Social Justice after the Welfare State have partnered with Columbia’s Global Centers in Istanbul, Mumbai, and Paris to further this goal. RGFGV is co-directed by Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, Janet Jakobsen, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. For the workshop program, click here.

Contributed by Joymala Hajra

“The Economics of Precision Medicine and Disparities in Health,” a talk by Dr. Kristopher Hult

The second Fall 2017 talk of the CSSD working group Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture (PMEPC) featured Dr. Kristopher Hult. In his presentation, “The Economics of Precision Medicine and Disparities in Health,” Dr. Hult shared his research and outlook on the potential of personalized medicine to increase the health impact of existing treatments, and thereby improve patient outcomes.

Balancing Treatment Efficacy and Risk

Dr. Hult used multiple sclerosis (MS), a progressive autoimmune neurological disorder, to highlight how personalized medicine may be able to improve clinical care. Existing therapies for MS differ considerably regarding their efficacy and risk of side effects between patients, making accurate assessment of patients’ individual responses highly valuable. For example, Tysabri, a leading immunosuppressive drug, can lead to progressive multifocal encephalopathy (PML), a debilitating neurodegenerative illness; however, the risk varies over 10-fold across patients. Through using genetic information and other molecular biomarkers, such effective medications can be targeted to patients who have the lowest risk, helping balance treatment efficacy and risk.

Innovations and the Market

Dr. Hult also presented a case for the potential of incremental innovations on existing FDA approved molecules or therapy. He discussed a quantitative model to assess the effects of policy interventions on innovations and how existing policy to incentivize orphan diseases can differentially affect incremental innovation with respect to novel innovation. While such policies have spearheaded the creation of new therapies, they can also lead to corporate exclusivity, increasing the market price and reducing subsequent innovation. In addition, the promise of exclusivity may further encourage corporate entities to utilize precision medicine approaches to find novel biomarkers, so that they can show that their agent is effective for a narrower segment of the population and thereby market it as an “orphan drug.” The long-term implications of such approaches on pharmaceutical innovation and patient care are unclear at present. Ultimately, evaluating the effects of novel vs. incremental innovation requires comprehensive understanding of the factors that determine health outcomes, such as the impact of a drug on the length and quality of life, cost of the drug, and accessibility of the drug and insurance. However, as Dr. Hult acknowledged, the medical actionability of a disease is ever-shifting, making it difficult to accurately estimate these values.

Precision Prevention

The potential of personalized and precision medicine extends beyond the population who are already sick. It also has the promise to identify healthy individuals at risk, and prevent disease through targeted therapy, with “precision prevention” practiced on a broader scale. However, doing so involves significant financial considerations, and as healthcare spending continues to rise, there is a need to accurately measure the cost efficacy of the interventions proposed. As health systems across the globe shift to policies that prioritize value as well as volume, such considerations are of prime importance. As Dr. Hult noted, personalized medicine promises to revolutionize the production and targeting of pharmacotherapy, and his talk provided a valuable economic perspective on how to evaluate its impact on healthcare innovation and outcomes.

Contributed by Neha Dagaonkar and Emily Groopman

A Human Origin Story in the Age of Biotech, Race, and Science: A Talk with Priscilla Wald

Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University, presented her talk “Cells, Genes and Stories: HeLa and the Patenting of Life” as part of the CSSD project Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture, followed by a discussion with the Precision Medicine working group in September.

A Particular Narrative of Human Origins
The discussion challenged the working group to consider the following: What does it mean to be human in the age of biotechnology? What defines being human? Is there a delineation, by which we are human on one side and non-human on the other?

Dr. Wald pushes these fundamentally humanistic questions to the forefront, and asks us to question why they matter. Why is our human-ness important to distinguish? In a thought-provoking account of the ethically-charged events surrounding the history of genetic engineering, she suggests a compelling human need to create a narrative about our origins – a narrative about the origin of humanity.

Among anthropologic creation myths and religious creation stories, scientific evolution is itself a particular narrative and attempt to understand ourselves and our place in this world. Modern genetics enables us to reach our arm further into our origin and kinship stories than before. To be part of some broader meaning is a potent need, and the methods we use to understand who we are as a species need careful consideration.

Social Fears and Biotechnology
These human questions are echoed in our concerns about new genetic technologies – we carry our social fears and taboos like a sack, passing it from new biotechnology to biotechnology. The exact set of questions which probe technology’s implications for our “humanity,” “being human,” and “sacred life” follow us. What is once unthinkably horrific at its advent – organ transplantation, IVF reproduction, and now genetic tinkering and artificial wombs – becomes medicalized and mundane with implementation. Without particularly negative technological repercussions, we forget and move the sack of concerns forward onto the next potential biotech invention.

Questions of patenting and intellectual ownership of living molecules have risen to prominence in the legal sphere during the last few decades, alongside the rise of biotechnology’s presence in science and our lives. Diamond v Chakrabarty (the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the living nature of a genetically-modified organism is no bar to patentable subject matter) and Moore v Regents (a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that denied a property ownership right to one’s cells) both herald the shape of legal questions to come in this new age of biotech commercialization.

Race, Genetics, and Racism
If there is one pressing certainty that arose from the discourse, it is that we cannot venture further into this future of new genetic capabilities without understanding the deeply social implications of its effects. Race is a social category, not a biological one – yet genetics plays centrally into many racist narratives. Racism as much as race affects health outcomes. Humans are 99.9% identical, but it is the 0.1% that is most often explored, plumbed for its depths, and commercialized. 23&Me and similar genetic analysis organizations capitalize on this interest, rising to meet demand for an ethnographic narrative of our origins, but falling far short of providing real accuracy or insight for what individuals seek to discover about themselves.

The truth that may be most difficult to remember in the coming years of the Genetic Age is that we are not a sole product of our genetics. We are an amalgamation of our genetics, environment, society, and the complex interactions and reactions of those dimensions in epigenetics. Dr. Wald convincingly pushes us to return to questions about which particular narrative is being advanced about human origins, ‘us versus them’ kinship groups, and the motivations that underlie the narrative and why.

Science, Media, and the Markets
Social and institutional power structures determine who decides what is done with the data, and what stories are told about the data. Modern genetics is a form of biopolitics and power. When technology is controlled by capitalism, and when it is for commercial use or entertainment, who will pay for the technology becomes a defining question.

Above all, this discussion surfaced a highly persuasive case for cross-collaborations of the humanities and science, most especially in the communication of genetics research to the public – a conclusion that affirms this working group’s essential purpose and need. Linguistics, English, Philosophy, and their sister-humanities disciplines provide the insight and expertise on the medium by which all information is mediated and communicated: language. It is a medium that can be both uplifting and beautified, or subverted and yoked for alternate purposes. In communicating science to the media and public, we share the burden of responsibility for ensuring an accurate education.

Contributed by Jade Tan

PUBLISHED: "A Room of Their Own" by Susan Meiselas.

A Room of Their Own by Susan Meiselas, a member of the Reframing Gendered Violence working group, has been published by Multistory and is available at the Magnum Photos Store.

The book of photos chronicles the experience of residents in a women’s refuge in Black Country, a multi-ethnic, post-industrial region in the West Midlands, UK. After Meiselas was invited to photograph the residents she developed a collaborative project with the women who were willing to share their stories.

View some of the photos here and purchase the book here.