Paige West & Pacific Climate Circuits Have Published a New Paper in Oryx Journal
Paige West and the Pacific Climate Circuits working group have published a new paper that is the first to be co-authored by a combination of scholars and activists from Papua New Guinea, the USA, as well as Indigenous Elders from New Ireland.
Paige West and the Pacific Climate Circuits working group have published a new paper entitled “Reimagining Conservation Practice: Indigenous self-determination and collaboration in Papua New Guinea” earlier this year in the journal Oryx, the International Journal of Conservation published by Cambridge University. The paper focuses on Indigenous community-based conservation methods and is the first to be co-authored by a combination of scholars and activists from Papua New Guinea, the United States, as well as Indigenous Elders from New Ireland.
Office of the Provost Mid-Career Faculty Grant
Congratulations to Spring 2021 Grant awardees Kevin Fellezs (Music), Natasha Lightfoot (History), and Camille Robcis (French, History).
We are pleased to congratulate CSSD working group members Kevin Fellezs, Natasha Lightfoot and Camille Robcis on receiving a Spring 2021 Columbia Office of the Provost Mid-Career Faculty Grant in recognition of significant contributions to their fields.
Kevin Fellezs received the grant for his work on The Love Song in Black Popular Music, 1945-2000. He is Associate Professor of Music, Ethnomusicology & African American & African Diaspora Studies and former co-director of CSSD’s Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics working group.
Assistant Professor Natasha Lightfoot received the grant for work on her project, Fugitive Cosmopolitans and the Making of the Black Atlantic. She teaches Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History, and was a member of CSSD’s former Digital Black Atlantic working group.
Associate Professor Camille Robcis received the grant for her forthcoming project, tentatively titled The Gender Question: Populism, National Reproduction, and the Crisis of Representation, in which she explores the protests against the so-called “theory of gender” and their conceptual links to populism. She teaches modern European intellectual history, and is a member of CSSD working group Queer Aqui.
Kevin Fellezs in The Guardian
Professor Fellezs commented on protest songs and “freedom musics” in this polarized time
Informed by his work on the intersections of music and collective liberation, Professor Kevin Fellezs commented on “freedom musics” in The Guardian’s article on rightwing co-optations of protest songs.
Kevin Fellezs is Associate Professor of Music, Ethnomusicology & African American & African Diaspora Studies and former co-director of CSSD’s Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics working group.
Columbia University Partners with Howard University to Launch New Collaborative Black Studies Book Series, Diversity Program
Kevin Fellezs and Farah Jasmine Griffin will be editorial board members for this historic collaboration.
Columbia University Press, in collaboration with Howard University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Columbia's Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, is launching a new Black studies book series, with additional plans to recruit students for careers in the publishing industry. Co-director of the Pacific Climate Circuits working group, Kevin Fellezs, and co-director of the Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Farah Jasmine Griffin, will be two of the four editorial board members representing Columbia in this historic collaboration.
CSSD Director Featured in New York Times Article
Paige West, former co-director of the Pacific Climate Circuits working group, calls attention to the relationship between biodiversity decline and colonialism.
Paige West, anthropologist and current director of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, was quoted in a New York Times article published this week titled “There’s a Global Plan to Conserve Nature. Indigenous People Could Lead the Way.” In the article, Professor West highlights the extent to which contemporary climate change and worsening biodiversity is linked to vestiges of colonialism. Paige West was a co-director of the former group Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering and Economics, a CSSD working group in which researchers utilized historically-bound and socioeconomic frameworks to create solutions around climate change in different regions.
Read the full NYT article here and learn more about Paige West’s work here.
CSSD Director Honored as One of 50 Explorers Changing the World
Paige West is highlighted by Forbes as one of 21 women to receive this recognition.
Paige West, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference and Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, was named as one of 50 honorees who are changing the world by the Explorers Club. This designation honors Professor West's years of work in conservation and biodiversity, and collaborations with indigenous communities. She is one out of 21 women to receive this honor and is highlighted by Forbes.
Read the full Forbes article here.
See the full list of the Explorers Club 50 here.
Learn more about Professor West’s work at CSSD through her past working groups:
Reframing Gendered Violence
Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics
Former Co-Director of Pacific Climate Circuits Interviewed by El Fénix
Professor Kevin Fellezs discussed recent protests against police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.
Professor Kevin Fellez, director of Studies on the Diaspora of Afro-Americans and Africans at Columbia University and co-director of former Center for the Study of Social Difference workin group, Pacific Climate Circuits , spoke with the Chilean newspaper, El Fénix in a piece titled, "I Can't Breathe": Accounts of Anti-racist Protests in the United States about systemic racism, police brutality, and the mainstream rhetoric that is used to justify police brutality.
CSSD Director Paige West’s Essay Published in Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon
Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon was published by Punctum Books
Paige West, CSSD director and former director of the Pacific Climate Circuits working group, published an essay on dispossession in Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon. The volume is “an immediate catalogue of the climate crisis toward ‘pluralizing perception and thereby open up the range of possible action.’”
To access the piece, click here.
To learn more about the Pacific Climate Circuits working group, read here.
CSSD Director Writes Afterword for Ethnos’s Journal of Anthropology
Paige West’s piece is entitled Translations, Palimpsests, and Politics: Environmental Anthropology Now.
Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) director and former co-director of CSSD Reframing Gendered Violence and Pacific Climate Circuits working groups, Paige West, writes an afterword for Ethnos’s publication, Translations, Palimpsests, and Politics: Environmental Anthropology Now. Paige says that the issue discusses “environmental anthropology and how we write and think against attempts at universal wordings.”
To read the issue, click here.
Paige West Leads Essay Series Ruminating the Future of Anthropology
The essay series is entitled "From Reciprocity to Relationality: Anthropological Possibilities."
Paige West, CSSD Director and former co-director of the Pacific Climate Circuits and Reframing Gendered Violence working groups, led the publication of an essay series that brought together sixteen anthropologists to discuss the possible futures of the field of anthropology. Published on the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the essay series focused on analyzing the power dynamics of racism, elitism, sexism, and violence within the field historically and continuing into the present.
Read more about the essay series here, and her introduction here.
Paige West Delivers the Annual Contested Development Lecture at King's College London
The lecture, entitled “Commoning and Decannonizing Political Ecology: An Example from Melanesia and New York City,” took place on October 30th.
Last month, CSSD Director and former co-director of the Pacific Climate Circuits working group, Paige West delivered the annual Contested Development Lecture at King's College London as a part of their Human Geography Seminars. West’s talk, “Commoning and Decannonizing Political Ecology: An Example from Melanesia and New York City,” addresses the necessary transformations the field of Political Ecology must undergo to meet the demands of a changing world through the lens of a decade long collaborative project located in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea.
Read more about her recent lecture here.
To learn more about Paige West’s work in Papua New Guinea, read about the June 2019 Voices on the Ground: Human Rights Defenders Workshop here.
CSSD Welcomes Paige West as Director
Co-director of Reframing Gendered Violence and Pacific Climate Circuits working groups appointed as Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference
Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, begins her directorship of the Center for the Study of Social Difference this summer after having served as co-director of two CSSD working groups, Reframing Gendered Violence and Pacific Climate Circuits.
“I’m honored to have been selected to direct CSSD for the next few years,” says Dr. West. “The center’s goal of creating space for our community to come together to work towards scholarship that pushes our understanding of social difference in new directions and that produces social change lies at the heart of why I initially became a scholar.”
Dr. West’s broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. More specifically, she has written about the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood and produced, the aesthetics and poetics of human social relations with nature, and the creation of commodities and practices of consumption.
In addition to her academic work, Dr. West is the co-founder, and a board member, of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans. Dr. West is also the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge.
J.C. Salyer Honored by Arab-American Family Support Center
J.C. Salyer, former co-director of CSSD working group Pacific Climate Circuits, was recognized for his dedication to Brooklyn’s Arab-American community and his work to strengthen cross-cultural ties.
J.C. Salyer, Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Barnard and former co-director of CSSD working group Pacific Climate Circuits, was honored by the Arab-American Family Support Center as well as by the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams. Professor Salyer is also co-director of the new CSSD working group Migrant Personhood and Rights: Crises of Recognition to be launched in the September of 2019.
His dedication to Brooklyn’s Arab-American community and his work to strengthen cross-cultural ties was recognized during the annual Arab-American Heritage Celebration at Brooklyn Borough Hall on Thursday, April 4th.
The full press release can be read here.
For more on the Pacific Climate Circuits working group check out their webpage.
Stay tuned for more on new working group Migrant Personhood and Rights, launching September 2020!
J.C. Salyer is an anthropologist and a lawyer whose work focuses on law and society, immigration law, and social justice. He is also the staff attorney for the Arab-American Family Support Center, a community-based organization in Brooklyn, and runs the organization’s immigration clinic. His current research focuses on migration, disruption, and displacement related to climate change in the southwestern Pacific.
Kevin Fellezs speaks about Ethnomusicology with Columbia College Today
Kevin Fellezs, member of the CSSD working group Pacific Climate Circuits, spoke about teaching and his love of music with Columbia College Today.
Kevin Fellezs, member of the CSSD working group Pacific Climate Circuits and Associate Professor of music at Columbia University, was featured in the Summer 2018 issue of Columbia College Today. In the interview he talks about how he grew to love music and his experiences both as a student and a teacher.
The full interview can be read here.
Congratulations to CSSD graduate fellows and assistants on defending their dissertations
Ph.D. students from several CSSD working groups have completed their programs this year.
Congratulations to the following Ph.D. candidates who have defended their dissertations and received their Ph.D.s this year! All of these students have been invaluable members of working groups at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, as graduate fellows or graduate assistants:
From the Women Mobilizing Memory working group:
Nicole Gervasio (English)
Andrew Crow (English)
Alyssa Greene (German)
From the Social Justice After the Welfare State working group:
Anna Halperin (History)
George Aumoithe (History)
From the Pacific Climate Circuits working group:
Patrick Nason (Anthropology)
CSSD project director Paige West discussed the UN Sustainable Development goals at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York
Paige West, project director of the CSSD working group Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics discussed the UN Sustainable Development goals at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York.
Paige West, project director of the CSSD working group Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics discussed the UN Sustainable Development goals at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York.
West’s presentation was titled “Bridging the Goal Gap: How We Integrate Climate Action, Life on Land and Gender Equality.”
She was joined by Ambassador Ruben Escalante Hasbun, the permanent representative of El Salvador, Torbors Sogluman, the director of Taiwan World Vision, and Angel Munoz, a Lamont climate scientist, to discussed the UN Sustainable Development goals and the intersections between goal 15 (life on land), goal 14 (life below water) goal 13 (climate action) and goal 5 (gender equality).
The event, a seminar on “Indigenous Peoples and the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” was presented by the Academic Council on the United Nations System and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York.
Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics applies lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and inequality to the current analyses of climate change in the Pacific Region, this project seeks to reframe the conversation about climate change and Pacific Islanders.
Photo caption: Paige West, pictured alongside Ambassador Ruben Escalante Hasbun, Torbors Sogluman and Angel Munoz.
CSSD Project Co-Director Kevin Fellezs to Give Two Lectures in China
Kevin Fellezs, Co-Director of the CSSD Project Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics, will give two upcoming lectures in China, entitled “Fusion, Then…And Now: Thoughts on the Persistence of the Broken Middle”.
Kevin Fellezs, Co-Director of the CSSD Project Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics, will give two upcoming lectures in China, entitled “Fusion, Then…And Now: Thoughts on the Persistence of the Broken Middle”. Fellezs will speak at two eminent musical conservatories in China: the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing (widely considered the most prestigious in the country) and the Tianjin Conservatory of Music in Tianjin.
In addition to serving as a CSSD Project Co-Director and Executive Committee member, Fellezs is Assistant Professor of Music and African American Studies in the Department of Music, with a joint appointment with the Institute for Research in African-American Studies.
Paige West wins Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award
The 2017 award goes to CSSD Project Director Paige West for Dispossession and the Environment.
The Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award is funded by the office of the Provost. It will be awarded annually by the Press to a book by a Columbia University faculty member that brings the highest distinction to Columbia University and Columbia University Press for its outstanding contribution to academic and public discourse.
The 2017 award winner is Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea, by Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University. Professor West is a Project Director for CSSD project Pacific Climate Circuits: Moving Beyond Science, Technology, Engineering, and Economics.
About Dispossession and the Environment:
When journalists, developers, surf tourists, and conservation NGOs cast Papua New Guineans as living in a prior nature and prior culture, they devalue their knowledge and practice, facilitating their dispossession. Paige West’s searing study reveals how a range of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today’s globalized world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust understanding of the ideological work that capital requires for constant regeneration.