The Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair (ZCMP), co-directed by Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Diana Taylor (New York University), seeks to find reparative ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic, while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on different Upper New York City neighborhoods. It is housed at the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia University and is supported by a CSSD Social Engagement grant funded by the Columbia University President’s Office. CSSD is pleased to announce that the Zip Code Memory Project is the recipient of a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for a two-year term beginning July 1, 2021.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!
Episodes, show notes, and transcripts can be found on the Just Three podcast page here.
The Center for the Study of Social Difference wishes to congratulate Professor Jack Halberstam, the David Feinson Professor of the Humanities, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Director of the Institute the Study of Gender & Sexuality (ISSG), and Director of the former CSSD Working Group Queer Aquí, has been named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.
Read the full ISSG article here.
The Center for the Study of Social Difference wishes to congratulate Mana Kia, Associate Professor in MESAAS and the director of the new Alternative Ways of Being project starting at CSSD this coming fall, for receiving an Award for Community Building and Engagement at the inaugural Humanities Faculty Recognition Awards.
The awards were presented on March 6, 2024, and honored faculty members in the following categories: Academic Excellence and Community Building and Engagement. Awardees were chosen by Acting Dean of Humanities Bruno Bosteels in consultation with the thirteen Humanities Chairs
The Extractive Media Working Group at CSSD will be co-sponsoring Camera South Asia II alongside the South Asia Institute as they return this year to host a conversation that takes an expansive view of South Asia and its diasporic geographies. Our renowned roster artists, curators, and scholars probe the relation between aesthetics and politics, migration and memory, be it in post-1990s India or the 19th century oceanic voyages of the subcontinent’s “old diaspora.” Camera South Asia seeks to balance a focus on the contemporary with a long view of the past and to unsettle easy ascriptions of identity or authenticity, be it for individuals or for images.
The Center for the Study of Social Difference [CSSD] is looking for two ABD graduate students to join the CSSD Business Office for at least one academic year. We are searching for applicants interested in a cross-disciplinary approach to issues of social difference locally and globally. CSSD works across the University to support faculty Working Groups and social engagement projects that foster ethical and progressive social change. To learn more about CSSD, please visit our website.
Candidates can develop administration skills by working closely with the CSSD staff on Center operations and project management. They should expect to commit 10 hours per week to their roles at the Center.
ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR RESPONSIBILITIES:
Events Coordinator: Primary responsibilities include organizing Working Group requests for meetings, events, and travel
Communications Coordinator: Primary responsibilities include preparing CSSD communication for the newsletter, social media, blog, and annual report
ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR PAY:
The administrative coordinator roles offer an expected total pre-tax salary of $5K/semester (assuming 10 hours per week). It will be paid out hourly through the casual student administrative worker position, or ‘additional compensation’ if holding a Student Officer position simultaneously. The application deadline is May 3, 2024, with qualified candidates contacted or interviewed on a rolling basis. Apply early for the best opportunity for consideration. The start date is Monday, Sept. 2.
TO APPLY:
Applicants should email CSSDassistant@gmail.com the following information by May 3.
Please include CSSD Coordinator Position in the Subject line.
CV and cover letter
1-2 paragraphs describing your interest in working with CSSD, your administrative experience, and expected commitments for the September 2024 – June 2025 term
Name and contact information for three references
Seeds of Diaspora WG Director Lynnette Widder will be co-sponsor an April 10 Event along with the Columbia Climate School, titled "The Great Padma: The Epic River that Made the Bengal Delta.”
Among others sponsoring and contributing to the event are CSSD fellows Anelise Chen and Ana Paulina Lee.
We hope you are able to participate in this phenomenal event.
Premilla Nadasen, Co-Director of the Transnational Black Feminisms Working Group, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College, will be leading to events this April related to the theme of Care.
April 5-6, 2024: Care, Racial Capitalism, and Social Reproduction, led by Premilla Nadasen (BCRW C0-Director and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History), brings together scholars, organizers, and artists to consider the intersections of social reproduction, racial capitalism, care, the state, and liberatory social change. Social reproduction signifies the labor necessary to maintain and reproduce human life and the labor force. It provides a lens to consider the social relations through which life is made, sustained, and might be transformed. Drawing on the long history of organizing and theorizing forged by feminist activists, low-wage women of color organizers, and scholars who have pushed us to expand our political analysis to include the dimensions of paid and unpaid domestic, emotional, and reproductive labor, this project considers the following questions: What is social reproduction and why does it matter? How does social reproduction broaden the scope of what counts as work and who counts as a worker? How does racial capitalism help us analyze and understand the value of social reproduction? How is the changing landscape of social reproduction reflective of political and economic shifts? And how is capitalism remaking itself in relation to social reproduction? Building on the work of feminist scholars and activists and the Black Radical Tradition, we also consider how social reproduction can and has been a site of organizing: What are the possibilities and limits of care for labor organizing, disability justice, and abolitionist organizing? How do we understand care in relation to social transformation and the state? Learn more about this event on the BCRW page here.
April 18, 2024: Care: the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Premilla Nadasen (Barnard College) will be joined by Dorothy Roberts (University of Pennsylvania) to discuss her new book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023), a powerful critique of capitalist care relations and the economic profit extracted from care. Care traces the rise of the care economy, from its roots in slavery, where there was no clear division between production and social reproduction, to the present care crisis, experienced acutely by more and more Americans. Today’s care economy, Nadasen shows, is an institutionalized, hierarchical system in which some people’s pain translates into other people’s profit. Yet this is also a story of resistance. Low-wage workers, immigrants, and women of color in movements from Wages for Housework and Welfare Rights to the Movement for Black Lives have continued to fight for and practice collective care. These groups help us envision how, given the challenges before us, we can create a caring world as part of a radical future. Learn more about this event on the BCRW page here.
Click this link to read the latest blog post on the Prison Education and Social Justice Working Group, titled “Transforming Prison Education from the Inside: How a Columbia Initiative is Impacting Change.”
On March 22-23, the Transnational Black Feminisms Working Group at CSSD and the Barnard Center for Research on Women co-sponsored the 49th Scholar and Feminist Conference: Anti-Colonialism, Black Radicalism, and Transnational Feminism.
Take some time to watch the videos below.
Many thanks to everyone who joined us, from panelists to audience members, and thanks to everyone involved in organizing and co-sponsoring a truly transformative conference.
Marxism and Transnational Black Feminist Liberation with Charisse Burden-Stelly, Dayo Gore, and Robyn Spencer-Antoine, moderated by Premilla Nadasen
Black Women and Anti-Colonialism, 1940s-1980s with Lynette Jackson, Laurie Lambert, and Paula Marie Seniors, moderated by Imaobong Umoren
The Colonial Legacy, Gender, and Economic Empowerment with Yolande Bouka, Jennifer Fish, Natasha Lightfoot, and Keisha-Khan Perry, moderated by Tami Navarro
Intellectual and Activist Interventions in Contemporary Movements, with Layla Brown, Zifeng Liu, and Gabriella Muasya, moderated by Tami Navarro
Insurgent Domesticities Working Group Member Lilian Chee has contributed a chapter, titled “Titled “Domesticity and the Architecture Film: Caring-With Architecture,” to the recently released book: Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common (Routledge, 2023).
To read more about the book launch for this work, as well as its related text, Architecture from Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023), follow this link.
Click here to access Extractive Media’s latest blog post follow their March 4 seminar with scholars Eleanor Johnson and Jonah Rowen.
Plate 1, “The Colonial House,” from Carl Bernhard Wadström, An Essay on Colonization (1794).
For information on the past event itself, you can access the original event page here.
This is a kind reminder that the Center for the Study of Social Difference’s deadline for accepting project proposal submissions is this Friday, March 8, at 9 AM.
We look forward to receiving your submissions.
Participants in the Prison Education and Social Justice Curricula Working Group have been teaching a range of Columbia courses in prisons.
Professor Jennifer Middleton, supported by Nick Ide, taught “Earth: Origin, Evolution, Processes, Future” at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the fall semester.
Professor Alisa Solomon is teaching “Journalism & Public Life” at Sing Sing this spring.
Professor Samuel Kelton Roberts is teaching “Histories of Public Health in Communities of Color: The Built Environment in the 20th Century United States” at Taconic Correctional Facility spring.
And Professor Julie Crawford is teaching “Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, Paradise” at Taconic this spring.
CSSD wishes to congratulate Recovery Working Group member Nadja Eisenberg Guyot who has recently published a piece in City & Society, the journal of the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology.
The piece is titled "On how to live while being thrown away: Black people who use drugs and the politics of anti-disposability, North Philadelphia, circa 2007 to 2010."
The Prison Education and Social Justice Working Group will hold an informational panel on March 4th at The Heyman Center, introducing graduate students from across Arts & Sciences to the range of paid opportunities to teach in prison contexts and support justice-impacted students through Columbia’s Justice-in-Education (JIE) Initiative.
When: Monday, March 4, 2024
12:30-1:45 PM
Where: The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room
Visit the event page on our website for more information and to RSVP through the CU Center for Justice
Motherhood and Technology Working group member George Estreich, who recently became the Nonfiction Editor at literary magazine AGNI, published “Tlön, Uqbar, ChatGPT” in The Journal of Philosophy and Disability, Vol. 3, 2023.
His essay "Concision: A Sprawl," originally published in AGNI, was chosen by Vivian Gornick for The Best American Essays 2023.
In February, he was part of a panel at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Kansas City: "Writing and Intellectual Disability: An Inclusive Panel." This panel included both published writers and people with Down syndrome, including his daughter Laura.
Refugee Cities Working Group member and author of Creating Local Democracy in Iran: State Building and the Politics of Decentralization (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), Kian Tajbakhsh recently publish an article in The Atlantic, titled “Iran Is Not a ‘Normal’ Country.” You can find the article here.
The third and final book launch event for for The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism (Duke University Press 2023), originating out of the Religion and Global Framing of Gender Violence Working Group.
This third event was hosted by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and a video recording of the event, as well as transcripts and more, are available through their website here.
Visit the Audio section of our Media tab, or click on the hyperlink, to check out the audio recording from the (9-14-23) Book Launch for The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press), titled “State Violence is Gender Violence,” hosted by the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender.
This publication came out of the work of the Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence Working Group at CSSD.
CSSD has published a recording of "Civilizing Interventions: Humanitarianism and Gender Violence," a book launch event for The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism (Duke University Press 2023), originating from the Religion and Global Framing of Gender Violence Working Group.
This event features scholars and experts crucial to the production of this work, including Jelani Cobb, Lila Abu-Lughod, Nina Berman, Rema Hammami, Sima Shakhsari, Dina M. Siddiqi, and Shenila Khoja-Moolji. It addresses the core question: "What happens when a visionary feminist project is integrated into contemporary world affairs?"
Please click the link here to watch the video recording of this book launch, or click the Video tab in the Header under Media.
The video is also available on our YouTube channel, accessible here.
After six years directing the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL), Professor Matthew Engelke is set to assume the role of Chair for the Department of Religion at Columbia. As an Extractive Media fellow and long-time affiliate of CSSD, we congratulate Professor Engelke on this wonderful achievement.
To read more on Engelke’s plans for the department and his own work, follow this link to read the entire Columbia News interview.
