Elections to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Congratulations to Professors Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Mabel O. Wilson on joining the Academy.
Congratulations to University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Associate Professor Mabel O. Wilson on their election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Spivak is University Professor and Founder of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia, and former co-director of CSSD working group The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories.
Wilson is Associate Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia, and a member of former CSSD working groups Engendering the Archive and Reframing Gendered Violence.
Brent Hayes Edwards Spotlighted for “Quarantine Collages”
The New York Times art critic listed Professor Edwards’s Instagram as one of five art accounts to follow.
A New York Times art critic listed Professor Brent Hayes Edwards’s Instagram account as one of five to follow for his indispensable “quarantine collages.” Read the full article here.
Edwards teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia, and was a member of CSSD’s former working groups The Digital Black Atlantic and The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories.
CSSD Collaboration with Columbia Global Center in Istanbul 2018-2019
CSSD projects and affiliates were featured in the Center’s most recent Annual Report.
The Columbia Global Center in Istanbul’s 2018-2019 Annual Report features project and affiliates of the Center for the Study of Social Difference. The Reframing Gendered Violence working group held four workshops in 2018 as a part of their workshop series hosted by the Istanbul Global Center. These workshops aimed to open up a critical global conversation among scholars and practicioners in order to reframe the issue of violence against women as it is currently discussed in a wide range of fields, both academic and policy-oriented. This series included “Beyond Prevalence: The Next Genderation of Campus Sexual Assault” on February 9th, “Institutionaled Violence and Gender: Innocence-Disposability-Resilience” on March 9th, “Interrogating Culture-Based Explanantions for Violence Against Women” on March 23rd, and “Turkish Students Present on Reframing Gendered Violence” on June 7th.
On September 25th, Women Mobilizing Memory (WMM) fellow and speaker at CSSD’s 10th Anniversary Symposium, Ayşe Gül Altınay, CSSD Executive Committee member and WMM co-director, Jean Howard, and director of the Queer Theory working group, Jack Halberstam, gave a talk entitled “Bridging Academia and Activism Thorugh Gender Studes.” The talk presented a critical reflection of the possibilities of doing feminism and gender studies in contemporary Turkey, with specific examples from the experiences of Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence.
Former CSSD director and co-director of the WMM working group, Marianne Hirsch, delivered a talk entitled “Women Carrying Memory: Stateless Figures,” along with Women Mobilizing Memory co-editor Ayşe Gül Altınay and Aylin Vartanyan. This talk looked at two recent memorial projects by feminist diasporic artists Mirta Kupferminc and Wangechi Muthu, which explored the vicissitudes and vulnerabilities of exile and statelessness, and suggested that stateless memory can open up the possibility of imagining alternative relationships between contemporary subjects and citizenship, national belonging, and home, as well as alternate temporalities of becoming.
The annual report also features a photo from a WMM Memory Walk conducted in Turkey. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, joined WWM fellow, Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, and Global Center Director and CSSD Women Creating Change Leadership Council member, Safwan Masri, for this insightful tour of Istanbul.
To view the entire 2018-2019 Annual Report from Columbia’s Global Center in Istanbul click here.
Jean Howard and Ana Paulina Lee to be Featured on Panel “A Celebration of Soft Power”
The discussion will revolve around American democracy, race, performance, and US-China relations.
CSSD Executive Committee member and former Women Mobilizing Memory co-director, Jean Howard, and co-director of the Geographies of Injustice working group, Ana Paulina Lee will be featured on the upcoming panel “A Celebration of Soft Power.” Fellow panelists will include David Henry Hwang and Denise Cruz and will address American democracy, race, performance, and US-China relations, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. The event will take place on December 3rd from 4 pm to 6 pm in Kent Hall and is free of charge.
To read more about the event, click here.
Gayatri Spivak Featured in the New York Times
Gayatri Spivak, co-director of the working group The Rural-Urban Interface, published an article entitled “Who Is Afraid of Shahidul Alam?” in which she speaks about the photojournalist’s imprisonment.
Gayatri Spivak, co-director of the working group The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories, and University Professor at Columbia, was featured in the New York Times with an article entitled, “Who Is Afraid of Shahidul Alam?” In the article she talks about the imprisonment of the Bangladeshi photojournalist and the country’s drift towards autocracy.
In addition, she recently delivered the Jean-Paul Sartre Memorial Lecture, “How Can we use Marx Today?” at the Asian Development Research Institute in Patna, India.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Delivers Keynote Lecture at Dhaka Art Summit
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, recently delivered the keynote lecture at the 2018 Dhaka Art Summit.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, recently delivered the keynote lecture at the 2018 Dhaka Art Summit. Professor Spivak’s keynote address “addressed the precarious situation of the Rohingya people in relation to Indigeneity in the world today, with a special emphasis on the languages of the Bengal region.”
Professor Spivak’s keynote lecture received news coverage in the Dhaka Tribune, and is available to watch online in full here.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Kenya and Ghana, Statistics and Stories. Spivak is also University Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and a founding member of CSSD affiliate the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delivers inaugural lecture for International Colloquium on Creative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
CSSD project co-director Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delivered the inaugural lecture at the International Colloquium on Creative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, at Sullamussalam Science College, December 12, 2017.
CSSD project co-director Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak delivered the inaugural lecture at the International Colloquium on Creative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, at Sullamussalam Science College, December 12, 2017.
Spivak’s address, which was followed by a panel discussion, “Spivak with Alternative Educators”, argued that “higher education means flexibility of imagination,” encouraging university students and faculty alike to pursue global research that extends beyond the university itself. The address is available to watch online, and further coverage is available at The Hindu.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Kenya and Ghana, Statistics and Stories. Spivak is also University Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and a founding member of CSSD affiliate the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Receives Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award from MLA
The Modern Language Association (MLA) has awarded Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, co-director of CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface, the eighth MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.
The Modern Language Association (MLA) has awarded Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and a founding member of CSSD affiliate the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the eighth MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. Professor Spivak is a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) and a co-director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Kenya and Ghana, Statistics and Stories.
The MLA Executive Council selected Spivak for the award on the recommendation of the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Review Committee and the Committee on Honors and Awards. Having first attracted acclaim for her translation of and magisterial preface to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) and her landmark article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1983), Spivak has influenced postcolonial studies, international feminism, postructuralist philosophies, critiques of globalization, as well as art and curatorial practices. She is also an activist in feminist and ecological social movements and rural education. In addition to receiving numerous honorary degrees, she has been awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy and the Padma Bhushan, given by the Indian government. The Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement will be presented to Spivak during the MLA Awards Ceremony at the January 2018 convention.
Read the award announcement on MLA Commons here.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, CSSD Project Director, interviewed about Rohingya refugee disaster
Director of the CSSD project The Rural-Urban Interface, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was interviewed about the Rohengy refugee disaster for TBS eFM's "This Morning" English radio program in Seoul, Korea.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, CSSD Project Director, interviewed about Rohengy refugee disaster
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, director of the CSSD Rural-Urban Interface project, was interviewed about the Rohingya refugee disaster for TBS eFM's "This Morning" English radio program in Seoul, Korea.
Spivak's interview is available for online listening here.