Afro-Nordic Feminisms
This working group is a Black feminist research and pedagogical project that centers Afro-Nordic identity, culture, social movements, and social justice organizing. We are calling this initiative Afro/Nordic/Feminisms, as we are interested in the areas of inquiry and methodologies named by the interplay between the three terms.
Afro-Nordic Feminisms
Project Co-Directors: Monica L. Miller and Nana Osei-Kofi
Graduate Coordinator: Ayesha Verma
This working group is a Black feminist research and pedagogical project that centers Afro-Nordic identity, culture, social movements, and social justice organizing. We are calling this initiative Afro/Nordic/Feminisms, as we are interested in the areas of inquiry and methodologies named by the interplay between the three terms.
Afro-Nordic Studies is, at best, a nascent field and largely unsupported by Nordic universities and academic institutions. “Race” as a category of identity is contested in the region; governments do not collect statistics on racial identity and do not recognize “race” as a category from which to make legal claims for equity and against discrimination. “Ethnicity” often stands in for race and racial difference is cathected to immigration; this results in the impossibility of Afro-Nordic identity. Vocabularies for talking about race and racialization have had to be borrowed from other languages and geographies and Nordic-specific terms are only just now emerging. This structural context has the effect of invisibilizing Afro-Nordic people, who are hypervisible minorities due to the overwhelming homogeny and whiteness of the Nordics. Their very presence questions national identity, reveals repressed colonial histories and eugenicist projects, and more contemporary global realities of migration and war. And yet, people of African descent in the Nordics, both native born and immigrants, are living Black lives that are deeply emplaced in Nordic geographies and histories, as well as connected to other Black communities in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and around the world. Afro-Nordic people and communities are actively creating and assembling archives of their presence and possibility as Nordic citizens and Black people in the diaspora.
Members of the group work on scholarship from across the Nordic countries, are of different generations, have worked inside and outside of the academy, and have different disciplinary orientations to the work. As mentioned above, the lack of recognition of race and insufficient vocabulary to talk about race has meant that many of our Nordic colleagues working in this area have faced difficulties securing material and intellectual support and mentoring. Many live, study, and work in the US. One aim of this group is to create a community of practice and a set of resources for each other and the next generation interested in Afro/Nordic/Feminist studies.
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Image credit: Pexels, Stein Egil Liland, “Dramatic Sky over Mountains”
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Motherhood and Technology
The Motherhood and Technology working group will explore how technological innovations have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood in recent decades. Advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of novel kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites mark this emerging constellation.
Motherhood & Technology
Project Co-Directors: Rishi Goyal, Arden Hegele
Graduate Coordinator: Niyati Shenoy
The Motherhood and Technology working group will explore how technological innovations have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood in recent decades. Advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of novel kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites mark this emerging constellation. Technological progress and development is often seen as the driver of these changes, but the revolution in motherhood is as much a product of changes in other domains: ethics, social structures, aesthetics, and lived experiences. Our group is motivated to understand how medical technologies have changed—and have been changed by—the experience of motherhood in a global context.
The field is rich with paradoxes. Cryogenic technologies, such as egg freezing and embryo storage, have afforded women new freedoms in choosing when to become mothers, yet the changing demographics of motherhood also raise troubling questions about the pressures of capitalism and the extension of worklife. Surrogacy has become a mainstream technology that affords biological parenthood to couples who might not otherwise have a child, yet the technology operates in a financial market that creates sharp global inequalities, with the burden of surrogacy often taken on by women of color in the developing world. Laboratory and biotechnical developments have produced unprecedented means to edit genetic material, but the unexamined use of new technologies (such as CRISPR) has led to ethical violations around the world. Meanwhile, advanced reproductive technologies have created new social forms that effectively evolve cultural norms, including new social and legal categories of parent and family – yet such technologies also reproduce market pressures and heteronormative family structures, perhaps vitiating counter-cultural practices. These and other dilemmas inform our group’s work in exploring and informing scholarship around motherhood and technology.
Foremost to our exploration is our strong conviction that technology is not neutral. Rather, we believe (following Heidegger) that technology operates as a form of “un-concealment” that reveals the “forcing into being” of culture. Thus, we are particularly interested in how the production of and access to such first-world biomedical technologies of motherhood both index and create broader cultural trends across what Arlie Hochschild has called “global care chains,” in which the burden of care is borne disproportionately by women of color and women in the developing world. We are motivated, then, to consider how technologies of motherhood operate among poor and working class women, both internationally and within the first world. While India has emerged as a global nexus of commercial surrogacy, in New York City and at the US southern border alike, technologies controlling motherhood, including monitoring technology, are used to regulate incarcerated and paroled women. Fundamental to our exploration is our conviction that these very different forms of technological intervention are working together to produce a global reimagination of motherhood.
As we explore these questions, we are guided by the interdisciplinary approach of the medical humanities. Medical humanities offers both a set of methodological approaches to address such challenges, and a broad umbrella under which to study the mutual influences of medico- scientific ideas and cultural/aesthetic practices. Medicine, from intimate care to public health policymaking, has much to contribute to a humanistic understanding of the social role of motherhood; meanwhile, approaches that emerge from a humanistic framework can enrich those coming from the physician’s black bag. The expansive view of the medical humanities will allow the group to develop a scholarly intervention into debates around technology and motherhood, while also producing a cultural artefact that narrativizes these dilemmas, and their solutions, for the public.
Bibliography
This bibliography gathers sources relevant to the topic of motherhood and technology as each sphere has come to impact the other in dimensions personal, social, political and financial. The bibliography represents mostly recent publications, and the sources range in discipline from the social and hard sciences, to journalism and literary nonfiction, to fiction, poetry, and film. Finally, the document concludes with a list of keywords that might simultaneously guide readers as they choose where to begin reading and as they start to connect readings from across the list.
Review the working group bibliography here.
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© Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery.
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Insurgent Domesticities
Insurgent Domesticities brings into focus the insurgent environments, objects, and practices that make up the maintenance, creation, labor, and intimacies of home. Our collective investigates the more processual aspects of domesticity, to interrogate the politics of ‘home,’ through histories of solidarity, disobedience, stealth, and militancy, from the scale of the clothesline to that of the state.
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES
Project Co-Directors: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Neferti X. M. Tadiar
Project Coordinator: Nadrah Mohammed
Managing Editor: Aastha D
‘Home’ has been used as a boundary-forming device to identify, homogenize, normalize and exclude. Composed of family and nation, and attendant notions of their sanctity, ‘home’ is no longer open to reinterpretation and reconfiguration; it is pressured as a lived space. Insurgent Domesticities brings into focus the insurgent environments, objects, and practices that make up the maintenance, creation, labor, and intimacies of home. Our collective investigates the more processual aspects of domesticity, to interrogate the politics of ‘home,’ through histories of solidarity, disobedience, stealth, and militancy, from the scale of the clothesline to that of the state.
The Insurgent Domesticities working group is committed to liberatory historiographical approaches and scholarly caregiving, orientations that transcend ideological frames deploying ‘domesticity’ to organize, limit, or subjugate life, time, people, and places, from the non-male figure to the non-capitalistic landscape. It draws on practices that emerge from and constitute interiority, which transform the figurations, materiality, and narrations of ‘home’ and ‘domesticity’ within the present worldwide protectionist climate, in which ‘home’ is still a fiercely pursued, maintained, and guarded space. Dissident domesticities, bound up in questions of governance, global economies, (geo)political borders, war, labor, and ecological crisis, call for emancipating, subversive, and collaborative research approaches that straddle or sit between territories, institutions, states, and national space. Through insurgent domesticities of laundry, gardens, cats, kitchens, the home office, the migrant camp, the kindergarten, the settlement, the housing block, the border wall, the reserve, or the reservation, we center histories of the active construction of home through occupancy, the making of new territories by transgressing boundaries, and the transcending or transforming of oppressive domestic structures.
Insurgent Domesticities indexes and reveals inequalities and injustices cohering social, cultural and political aspects of domesticity. Because domesticity is involved in the production of identity, security, comfort, and belonging, as well as strategies necessary to maintain the status quo, it serves as a double-edged tool that can be confining or emancipatory in its different guises. To combat the pliancy of its shapeshifting between safeguarding and critiquing notions of family and nation, migration and home, our collective proposes the fundamental understanding that domesticity is a politicized field of many interdependencies, from the sociospatial to the material and aesthetic, which demand regular negotiation and theorization.
Insurgent Domesticities is a working group under the CSSD theme, Women Creating Change, which engages distinguished feminist scholars from diverse fields who focus on contemporary global problems affecting women and on the roles women play in addressing these problems.
Resources
Publications
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2023).
Neferti X.M. Tadiar, Remaindered Life (Duke University Press, 2022).
Gil Z. Hochberg, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke University Press, 2021).
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Ifo 2 camp, Dadaab, Kenya. These shelter prototypes were designed and built as part of an international humanitarian initiative to expand a refugee settlement. Before the camp was officially populated, they were among the structures the police used to enable clandestine dwelling and sex work. How do we understand a homemaking of coercion and collaboration? How do we think with the paradoxes of insurgent domesticities?
Photo by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi.
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Past Events
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Nov. 17, 2023
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Sep. 23, 2023
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Jun. 9, 2023
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Apr. 14, 2023
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Mar. 24, 2023
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Mar. 20, 2023
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Feb. 10, 2023
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Jan. 13, 2023
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Dec. 2, 2022
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES GENERAL EDITORIAL MEETING
Nov. 11, 2022
INSURGENT DOMESTICITIES WRITING RETREAT
Sept. 29, 2022
SESSION VIII. GUEST: ZAHRA MALKANI AND SHAHANA RAJANI
Mar. 25, 2022
SESSION VII. GUEST: CHRISTINA SHARPE
(postponed)
SESSION VI. GUEST: ANURUPA ROY
Nov. 05, 2021 (rescheduled to February 11, 2022)
SESSION V. GUEST: HUDA TAYOB
Oct. 15, 2021
SESSION IV. QUEER AND FEMINIST CARE
May 14, 2021
SESSION III. MATERIAL INTIMACY
Apr. 23, 2021
SESSION II. ESTABLISHING THE INTERIOR
Mar. 19, 2021
SESSION I. CONCEPTS, EPISTEMOLOGIES, FEMINISMS
Feb. 5, 2021
INTAKE MEETINGS
Oct. 13-25, 2020
Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality for women in the United States, accounting for more deaths than breast cancer, cervical cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease combined, yet awareness of risk factors for CVD in women is extremely low and underprioritized. This group looks at big questions about what motivates women to make tangible changes to their health behaviors, and how to get people in health care policy, research funding, and the media more invested in women’s health issues.
Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change
Project Co-Directors: Sonia Tolani, Andrea Flynn
The Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change group seeks to identify barriers to heart disease awareness and explore pathways to change on a personal individual level as well as a community and population level that lead to improved women’s heart health.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality for women in the United States; accounting for more deaths than breast cancer, cervical cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease combined. In fact, more than double the number of women than men die of heart disease each year. CVD affects women of all ages, and more troublingly, the rate of death in young women on the rise. Despite this, while the majority of women age 40-60 have at least one risk factor for CVD, very few have had this risk assessed by their doctor. Women are also less likely to get lifestyle advice or be given medications to prevent heart disease compared to men with a similar risk profile. Further, nearly half of women are still not aware that CVD kills more women than cancer and only about a third of Hispanic and African American women identify it as the number one cause of death.
In order to effect real change, we must not only find ways to increase awareness of heart disease in women, but also identify ways to get women to make lasting changes in their lifestyle. This group proposes to study whether one specific tool, a mobile health App called Love My Heart, is better able achieve these goals compared with usual care. In addition, we hope as a multidisciplinary group that has united faculty from different departments, to explore more broadly ways digital tools and social media can improve health education and identify what factors, i.e. fear, empowerment, etc. promote women to exercise more and eat healthier, lifestyle changes that historically have been hard to achieve with a more traditional approach.There are currently more than 165,000 mHealth apps available and 3 billion were downloaded by consumers in 2015, but so many questions about the role of technology in health care remain unanswered. For example, can self assessment of risk compensate for inadequate health system screenings? Can gameification of heart healthy goals promote better adherence and outcomes? Can social media mediate the stigma of heart disease in women? We hope by providing a forum for this discussion we will encourage further research in this developing field.
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Transnational Black Feminisms
The Transnational Black Feminisms working group aims to think about how transnational Black feminisms can move us beyond survivability and demands for recognition, and instead generate alternative frames and understandings around belonging, community, justice, and equity. Black feminism has, by necessity, emerged in tandem with political mobilizations: the struggle against slavery anti-colonialism; demands for government assistance or social services; and opposition to sexual or state violence, including Black Lives Matter.
Transnational Black Feminisms
Project Co-Directors: Tami Navarro, Premilla Nadasen
The Transnational Black Feminisms working group aims to think about how transnational Black feminisms can move us beyond survivability and demands for recognition, and instead generate alternative frames and understandings around belonging, community, justice, and equity. Black feminism has, by necessity, emerged in tandem with political mobilizations: the struggle against slavery and colonialism; demands for government assistance or social services; and opposition to sexual or state violence, including Black Lives Matter. Such struggles have created the conditions of possibility for nurturing a politics of radical social transformation. They have also raised broader, foundational questions about the relationship between theory and praxis, lived experiences and the articulation of expansive visions of social change.
We have named this initiative transnational Black feminisms—with transnationalism as a modifier—because it foregrounds the long history of Black feminist praxis and theorization, dating back to the 19th century. “Black feminisms” also reflects our understanding of the importance of racial politics in the development of capitalism and global politics—what Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism”—as well as our goal of integrating a gendered analysis into the concept of racial capitalism. In an era of heightened anti-Black racism—which manifests as systematic police violence, webs of carcerality, discourses of cultural depravity, ghettoization, gentrification, and disposability—it is essential to center a politics of blackness through a feminist, queer, anti-capitalist and anti-imperial lens, as an important vector for the political and social possibilities of imagining and working towards the realization of justice.
In addition, problematic historical and contemporary stagings of the history of feminism in the U.S. position Black women as marginal to a more significant, mainstream white feminist movement, circumscribe them to a limited time frame, and continue the erasure of a long history of a Black feminist politic that was diasporic, imaginative, and radical in both theory and praxis. We hope to explore the historic and ongoing intellectual engagements between Black feminism, transnational feminism, queer politics, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism—all of which Black feminisms speak to through Black women’s analyses of intersecting oppressions, the simultaneity of oppression, and strategies for reimagining freedom.
We are particularly interested in charting, exploring, and interrogating the nuances and intricacies of transnational Black feminisms across time and space. Black feminist theoretical lenses have evolved out of internationalist and oppositional engagements throughout the Caribbean, Africa, South America, and Europe. This expansive global view will enable us to assess the coherence and/or visibility of a transnational Black feminist politic, as well as the convergences and divergences, overlaps and contradictions, and synergistic associations among Black feminism, Indigenous feminism, Latinx feminism, and Asian feminism.
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Menstrual Health and Gender Justice
The Menstrual Health and Gender Justice working group seeks to further the nascent field of menstrual studies. This group puts particular emphasis on critically evaluating the current state of research, with interest in examining whose voices are being represented in the field, which actors shape the dominant narrative, whose voices are marginalized, what the gaps are, and how interdisciplinary collaboration might help remedy some of these gaps.
Menstrual Health and Gender Justice
Project Co-Directors: Inga Winkler and Lauren C. Houghton
Project Coordinator: Susanne Prochazka (2023), Michelle Chouinard (2021)
Media Fellow: Amitoj Singh (2020)
The Menstrual Health and Gender Justice working group seeks to further the nascent field of menstrual studies. This group puts particular emphasis on critically evaluating the current state of research, with interest in examining whose voices are being represented in the field, which actors shape the dominant narrative, whose voices are marginalized, what the gaps are, and how interdisciplinary collaboration might help remedy some of these gaps.
The field is rich with questions: How do women and girls decide which menstrual care practices to adopt? How do girls experience menarche, how do women experience menopause, and what shapes these experiences? How do social media, magazines and social enterprises influence the discourse on menstruation? What are the implications of the recent case supported by the ACLU in which a woman claims to have been fired for leaking menstrual blood at work? Do recent policy developments address the needs of all menstruators, including the most marginalized? What is the role of development agencies and philanthropists in supporting menstrual hygiene management? What kind of interventions do they support and with which results? To what extent does language – menstrual health or menstrual hygiene management – matter? What cultural and religious practices exist around menstruation and how do they relate to gender equality?
Attention to menstrual issues across the lifespan surfaces broader societal issues and tensions, including gender inequality, practices and discourses of embodiment, processes of radicalization and commodification, and emergent technologies. From the perspective of gender equality, menstruation is a fascinating subject of study as it combines various facets including biological processes, deeply rooted stereotypes and social norms, and associated cultural and religious practices. Menstruation has become a category of analysis as a multi-dimensional transdisciplinary subject of inquiry and advocacy. Against this background, this working group capitalizes on the presence of faculty across different departments interested in menstruation and provides a forum for encouraging individual and collaborative research that crosses disciplinary boundaries.
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"Making Bubbles"
Photo credit: Jen Lewis, menstrual designer, Rob Lewis, photographer. Copyright 2018 Beauty in Blood
For more from the Menstrual Health
working group find them online:
Periods at Columbia Blog
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Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City
Geographies of Injustice is a working group of interdisciplinary scholars who are interested in asking how spatial politics intersects with inequality and social difference (race, caste, and ethnicity).
Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City
Project Co-Directors: Anupama Rao, Ana Paulina Lee
Project Coordinators: Ana Luiza de Abreu Claudio (2023), Iuri Bauler (2022), Sohini Chattopadhyay (2021)
Media Fellow: Jessica Jacolbe (2020)
Geographies of Injustice is a working group committed to exploring the question of subaltern urbanism and aesthetics from an explicitly South-South perspective by bringing urban studies into conversation with studies of social difference, inequality, and cultural production. We have a specific focus on representation and decolonization as they relate to subaltern urban architectural and infrastructural forms. We are particularly keen to bring studies of planning and built form into conversation with concerns about the particular vulnerabilities that minority communities face in navigating situations of urban marginalization.
Our project, “Reconstructing Memory in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas and Mumbai’s Zhopdis” seeks to develop a template for addressing spatial politics through engagements with historical memory, music, performance, and creative survival strategies of subaltern communities. Our working group draws on the convergent yet distinct urban trajectories of Bombay/Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro, cities associated with the slum and the favela, respectively, as connected sites from which to better apprehend today’s global housing crisis. We work with community museums and grassroots organizations to develop solutions that will influence policy and sustainable urban planning. We approach self-housing settlements in Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai through connected histories of the Global South where cheap labor, urban conflict and precarious living conditions define the social life of peripheral capitalism.
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Image by Michael Alvarez from the series, "We're Out Here"
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On The Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics
The working group On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics seeks to understand the role of nurses as change agents in the prevention, detection and response to pandemic infectious disease outbreaks.
On The Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics
Project Directors: Jennifer Dohrn, Wilmot James, Victoria Rosner
Coordinators: Kurt Holuba, Mina Shah
Graduate Assistant: Lauren J. DeVaughn
The working group On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics seeks to understand the role of nurses as change agents in the prevention, detection and response to pandemic infectious disease outbreaks. Although nurses are crucial to combatting pandemics, their work is often not considered when international leaders gather to discuss global health issues. This is a consequence of both the MD-centered hierarchy of medical practice and the fact that nursing remains a profession in which women – whose work is systemically undervalued -- predominate (in the US, over 90% of registered nurses are women). This is a dangerous omission, since although nurses are on the front lines of care, little is known about the range of activities they undertake beyond what may be obvious in patient care. Even key clinical innovations are often overlooked when they should be universally implemented. And there is little record of the painful choices nurses and other health professionals often make between taking care of patients and protecting themselves and their families.
This working group is necessarily inter-sectoral and inter-disciplinary. On the Frontlines draws on the work of the health science community – nursing, medicine, public health, evolutionary biology and immunology, as well as demography – to understand the changing nature of infectious diseases and how to manage and contain them. We engage the scholarship – international health regulations, international law and the doctrine of the duty to protect – that deals with the ethical character of leadership in the global health and biodefense communities and the barriers nursing leaders face in pursuing the public good. Further, to document the role of nurses, we draw on historical methods, anthropology and journalism to capture nurses’ experience in the field.
This group formed around an interest in understanding the work of nurses and midwives in the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In response to recent events, we have expanded our scope to include a comparative study of the work of nurses and midwives in the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. In collaboration with the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, we are conducting oral histories of COVID-19 nurses, and this effort is being jointly directed by Mary Marshall Clark and Jennifer Dohrn.
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Jennifer Dohrn, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, 2006
Forth coming: FrontlineNurses.org
Currently under construction, frontlinenurses.org will feature interviews with nurses active during the 2014-16 Ebola crisis in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
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Student Associates
RELIGION AND THE GLOBAL FRAMING OF GENDER VIOLENCE
Who pays the price and who benefits from the ways that religion is used to frame global understandings of Violence Against Women and gender violence? Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence (2016-19) aimed to reframe the conversation.
RELIGION AND THE GLOBAL FRAMING OF GENDER VIOLENCE
Project Directors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, Janet Jakobsen, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW)––and more recently, the expansive term “gender-based violence” (GBV)––has come to prominence as a highly visible and powerful agenda across a range of local, national, and global domains. By embedding gender violence in a complex matrix of international norms, legal sanctions, and humanitarian aid, the anti-VAW movement has been able to achieve a powerful international “common sense” for defining, measuring, and attending to violence against women in developing countries, particularly during conflict and post-conflict situations. Here, religion is regularly linked to gendered violence. We have seen this script play out countless times. Entire religious traditions are said to promote “cultures of violence.” Women in war are then abstracted out of their local contexts. The definition of VAW is narrowed to attacks on their bodily integrity (e.g. rape), and economic, political and structural forms of violence are excluded. Ending VAW becomes casus belli; local women’s calls for safe homes, safe public spaces, and stable governments are rendered unrecognizable as anti-violence interventions.
However, despite this powerful conflation of religion and VAW for geo-political ends, the crucial question of how religion intersects with VAW/GBV has hardly begun to be considered. Why and when is “religion” invoked in global responses to VAW/GBV? What roles are attributed to religion in these dynamic processes? How are new understandings of “religion” engineered through regimes of governance? What categories of the religious become seen as credible and acceptable, and are empowered as anti-GBV actors? What falls out? Who pays a price and who benefits from the ways religion is used to frame global understandings of VAW/GBV?
Given growing concerns about the conflation of religion and VAW for geo-political ends, the time is ripe for a project that mobilizes the collective experience, expertise, and creativity of an international group of critical feminist scholars, practitioners, activists, and journalists. “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence” examined the role of religion in naming, framing, and governing gendered violence. This three-year initiative was supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and was co-directed by Professor Lila Abu-Lughod (Anthropology/Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality). Through a focus on the Middle East and South Asia, the project opened a critical global conversation with the conviction that more nuanced analyses lead both to more effective strategies for decreasing gender violence, and to more robust understandings of how certain framings of religion and violence can cloud the very diagnoses that are so essential to treating human suffering.
Project co-directors with Abu-Lughod included Professors Rema Hammami, Institute of Women’s Studies, Birzeit University; Janet Jakobsen, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College; and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Director of the Gender Studies Program, Mada Al-Carmel, Arab Center for Applied Research.
The project is supported by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation from its initiative on Religion and International Affairs.
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THE RURAL-URBAN INTERFACE: GENDER AND POVERTY IN GHANA AND KENYA, STATISTICS AND STORIES
The Rural-Urban Interface (2015-18) studied migrant populations of women, youth and men in Ghana and in Kenya by combining oral histories with statistical analysis.
THE RURAL-URBAN INTERFACE: GENDER AND POVERTY IN GHANA AND KENYA, STATISTICS AND STORIES
Project Directors: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Reinhold Martin
This project, which represented the workshop phase of an interdisciplinary, regional, consortial, Africa-led research endeavor, studied the rural-urban interface in Ghana and in Kenya, concentrating on the experience of women, youth, and men who inhabit this social and physical space. The research group included colleagues at the Universities of Ghana-Legon and Nairobi as well as at Columbia and other New York-area institutions.
The rural-urban interface or continuum extends from the rural to the towns and cities of the African continent. It is quite variegated and is characterized by a complex nexus of sites, including primary and secondary sites in relationships of gain and loss, dominance and subordination, associated in different ways with rural-to-urban migration. This first phase of the project therefore attempted to situate key questions in the African context, and especially, in the rural-urban dynamics of the specific region being studied. Such questions included the interaction of space, gender, and political economy; the role of translation in interpretative social-scientific work; and the interplay of stories and statistics in knowledge making.
Workshops based on a pilot study initiated by colleagues on Ghana and/or Nairobi piad particular attention to gender relations in this space and to the feminization of poverty in migrant populations. The mix of approaches drawn from the humanities and social sciences was intended to help create productive collaborations among disciplines and among many actors, to get behind the statistics and move towards changing minds and building human capacity. As a working group, we looked at ways to combine qualitative knowledge with quantitative knowledge in a manner that highlights the real, impactful capacity of situated stories, narratives, and oral histories articulated by actual participants in these large-scale transformations, to illuminate and inflect the interpretation of other types of data that tend to dominate accounts and disproportionately inform policies. The humanities are a crucial source of knowledge of this sort, and, of language-sensitive learning techniques that are attentive to nuance and open to unexpected information or interpretations. Working with narratives, as well as statistics, yielded nuanced insights that are unavailable to more conventional approaches.
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GENDER & THE GLOBAL SLUM
How are gender relations impacted by material impoverishment and social segregation? Gender & the Global Slum (2013-17) looked at the social hazards of urban informality and its disproportionate effects on women.
GENDER & THE GLOBAL SLUM
Project Directors: Saidiya Hartman, Anupama Rao, Neferti Tadiar
Urbanization is a defining feature of contemporary globalization. The “megacities” of the twenty-first century are distinguished by two things: their location in the global South, and the ubiquity of informal, or “slum” housing as the primary mode of inhabitation for the majority of their urban dwellers (UNHCS Report, Challenge of Slums 2003; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums 2006). Contemporary urbanization thus presents us with a paradox: it is characterized by spectacular levels of economic growth, together with the informalization of existence.
How have informal housing and the contemporary slum become sites of global intervention, simultaneously conceived as (social) problem, and the site of social experimentation and creative, or resistant life? How are urban social relations, especially of gender, being transformed in the wake of neoliberalism, and the re-territorialization of urban space? Why do women suffer disproportionately from the social hazards of urban informality?
It is typical to attribute the persistence of slums in the global South to the culture of poverty, or as signs of corrupt or insufficient planning. Instead this project addressed the global slum as the product of a complex interplay between the political economy of urban space, and the spatialization of social difference, especially gender/sexuality. Our project addressed the contemporary “slum” as a social-spatial ensemble produced by overlapping and intersecting forces. These included: changing ideas about housing as a right vs. marketized commodity; infrapolitics, i.e., practices from electricity and water theft, to acts of defacement and violent conflict that are a response to social precarity and informalized existence; and the impact of international NGOs and the World Bank in shaping contemporary debates about slum redevelopment and rehabilitation. We located women’s growing vulnerability to new forms of intimate and extimate violence, and their reliance on illicit economies of survival and subsistence (including sex work) within broader infrastructural and policy shifts, to explore how gender is made and unmade in the context of global power.
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Reframing Gendered Violence
Reframing Gendered Violence (2016-19) aimed to open up a critical global dialogue among scholars and practitioners that recasts and broadens our understanding of what constitutes violence against women.
Reframing Gendered Violence
Project Directors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Kaiama Glover, Jennifer Hirsch, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Anupama Rao, Kendall Thomas, Paige West
Reframing Gendered Violence opened up a critical global conversation among scholars and practitioners that recasts the problem of violence against women as it is currently discussed in a wide range of fields, both academic and policy-oriented, including human rights, public health, journalism, law, feminist studies, literature, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, and history.
Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) have come to prominence as loci for activism throughout the world. Both VAW and GBV regularly garner international media attention and occupy a growing place in international law and global governance. Since 2000 alone there have been more than 25 UN protocols, instruments and conventions directed at its eradication or mitigation.
The working group engaged critically with the terms, the assumptions, and the policies that have underwritten this unprecedented outpouring of attention. What do different parties mean when they talk of violence against women or of gender-based violence? Is the main form of violence against women sexual in nature? Does it occur primarily in domestic settings? What is left out when the problem is framed in this way, and whose interests are served by such a framing? When invoked in the halls of the United Nations and used to shape international policy, the terms violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) are often assumed to have stable meanings, yet they do not.
CSSD, in collaboration with scholars, artists and activists located in the regions where Columbia has established Global Centers, examined in the most capacious way what constitutes gendered violence. The goal was to move the conversation on this crucial topic in new directions, pointing to elisions and exclusions in many common-sense understandings of these terms; deepening the ways in which we engage with the manifestations and causes of such violence; unpacking the politics through which accusations of GBV can sometimes be used to pathologize entire communities, societies or religious traditions, or to divert attention from more systemic forms of abuse such as economic, discursive, and political violence.
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Women Mobilizing Memory
Women Mobilizing Memory (2013-20) explored the politics of memory in the aftermath of the atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in comparative global perspective. The international working group analyzed the strategies by which women artists, scholars and activists have succeeded in mobilizing the memory of gender-based violence to promote redress, social justice, and a democratic future.
Women Mobilizing Memory
Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations?
Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.
Women Mobilizing Memory Book Events
Editors
Ayşe Gül Altınay is professor of cultural anthropology and director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence at Sabancı University.
María José Contreras is a performance artist and associate professor at the Faculty of the Arts of the Universidad Católica de Chile.
Marianne Hirsch is professor of English, comparative literature, and gender studies at Columbia University.
Jean Howard is professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Banu Karaca is assistant professor of anthropology and a Mercator-IPC Fellow at the Istanbul Policy Center.
Alisa Solomon is professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the MA Arts and Culture concentration.
Project Directors: Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Diana Taylor
Bringing together artists, writers, theater practitioners, museologists, legal scholars, social activists, and scholars of memory and memorialization, “Women Mobilizing Memory” focused on the political stakes and consequences of witnessing and testimony as responses to socially imposed vulnerability and historical trauma. It probed how individual and collective testimony and performance can establish new forms of cultural memory and facilitate social repair. Using gender as an analytic lens, this project explicitly explored women's acts of witness and the gendered forms and consequences of political repression and persecution. It asked what strategies of memorialization and re-imagining are most effective in calling attention to past and present wrongs and in creating possibilities of redress.
The group studied literary texts, visual images, memorials, archives of oral history and performances in the broadest sense, including acts of protest and the work of activist groups.
Hosted by the Columbia Global Centers in Latin America: Santiago and Istanbul, Turkey, it brought together feminist artists, scholars and activists from Columbia and the New York area with colleagues from Chile and Turkey.
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GENDER, RELIGION AND LAW IN MUSLIM SOCIETIES
Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies studied the unique forms of women’s activism across the Muslim world, looking at how efforts by women to work within an explicitly religious framework in order to transform society and participate more fully in public debates have influenced state. The group explored the divergences and points of contact between the flourishing work of those termed “Islamic feminists” and those who might best be called “Islamist women,” and evaluated the academic research used to promote the social inclusion and wider political transformation of women in the Islamic world.
Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies
Project Directors: Lila Abu-Lughod, Katherine Ewing
Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies was a project that studied the unique forms of women’s activism across the Muslim world, looking at how efforts by women to work within an explicitly religious framework in order to transform society and participate more fully in public debates have influenced state. The group explored the divergences and points of contact between the flourishing work of those termed “Islamic feminists” and those who might best be called “Islamist women,” and evaluated the academic research used to promote the social inclusion and wider political transformation of women in the Islamic world.
In addition to the Center for the Study of Social Difference, this project received support from the Luce Foundation through the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion’s project “Who’s Afraid of Sharia?”
The project presented three workshops:
Workshop I: Islamic Feminists, Islamist Women, and the Women Between
Organized by Lila Abu-Lughod, Katherine Ewing, and Anupama Rao
Over the past two decades, women’s activism has taken creative new forms across the Muslim world. Working within the frame of Islamic piety and engaging fully with the Muslim tradition, many women have been distancing themselves from the largely secular feminist projects of social reform, legal rights, or empowerment-through-development that had dominated the social field of women’s activism in most post-independence nations across the Muslim world.
Yet these efforts by women to work within an explicitly religious framework in order to transform society, refashion their roles as women, redefine their authority, and participate more fully in public debates and political fields have taken radically different paths, and influenced state policy in a number of ways. The first workshop brought together experts on gender, Islam, and various Muslim communities to explore the divergences and points of contact between the flourishing work of those who could be termed “Islamic feminists” and the locally but widely appealing work of those who might best be called “Islamist women.”
Islamic feminists are cosmopolitan educated women, often based in the West, who seek to enhance women’s rights and promote gender egalitarianism through reforms of Islamic family law and through re-interpretations of the key religious texts. They are concerned to counter “conservative” ideologies. This distinguishes them from “Islamist women,” among whom would be counted the significant numbers of women affiliated with the range of Islamist political parties operating in various countries, whether oppositional or government-affiliated.
Bringing together international scholars who work on different regions--from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa--this project examined these activist projects in light of the everyday lives of the women in between to whom they seek to appeal, paying close attention to diverse political and social contexts.
Workshop II: The Power of Women’s Islamic Education
November 8-9, 2013
Columbia University
Across the Muslim world, women are attending not just mosque study groups but new institutes for Islamic studies, Islamic universities, and seminaries. In the Western media “madrasas” are presented as incubators for fundamentalism. Islamic education is associated more with indoctrination and conservatism than enlightenment. As part of poverty alleviation and the empowerment of girls and women, the UN’s Global Education First Initiative seeks to “spur a global movement to put quality, relevant and transformative education right at the heart of the social, political and development agendas.” While this initiative recognizes “a broad spectrum of actors,” does Islamic schooling fit?
This workshop brought together scholars who have done ethnographic and historical research on women’s Islamic education in various countries to think more seriously about the types and content of these forms of schooling, the reasons why women are pursuing religious education when (secular) state education is widely available alongside it, and the social and personal impacts of these forms of education. From daily life to social relations and hierarchies; from forms of authority to the paths opened up; from intellectual skills to social capital: careful assessment is needed to appreciate the popularity of Islamic education, its political and social uses, and the ways it both empowers and limits women.
Workshop III: Debating the “Woman Question” in the New Middle East Women’s Rights, Citizenship, and Social Justice
May 3-4, 2014
Columbia Global Center \ Middle East
Organizing Committee: Lila Abu-Lughod, Hoda El Sadda, Amal Ghandour, and Safwan Masri
In light of the recent events across the Arab region, the time is opportune for a careful examination of the new opportunities and challenges facing Arab women. The Arab uprisings sought to challenge the status quo, demanding significant political and social transformation. Many women in the region hope that the “Arab Spring” will also mark a new dawn for women’s rights as well. Yet despite socio-political gains to be made by citizens in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), women’s full citizenship rights and privileges may still fall short. Debates about women’s rights and the place of women’s rights in political and economic struggles have become contentious.
What is distinctive about all these debates about women in the Arab world, as well as women’s activism on the ground in various countries in the region, is that they have occurred from the start in a context in which the international community have insistently made women’s citizenship and rights a key symbol of the success or failure of the revolutions and the value of new political orders. How does this international interest, which itself is linked to longstanding political and economic interests in the region (including alliances with the old regimes), affect the work of Arab women activists, the political projects they seek to undertake, and even the definitions of social justice with which they can work?
This workshop brought together scholars, academics, and practitioners for a collective critical evaluation of the situation, to consider how academic research on gender and rights relates to the work of practitioners in women’s organizations, and to assess conventional arguments about what is impeding women from full entitlements of citizenship. The goal was to develop the knowledge necessary for creative and effective strategies for promoting social inclusion and wider political transformation.
The workshop was organized around three broad themes:
Bread and Dignity: Political Economies and Women’s Lives
What’s in a Constitution? Political and Legal Strategies for Citizenship and Social Justice
Who’s Afraid of Shari’a? Islamic Feminism and Islamist Governance
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Social Justice After the Welfare State
Social Justice After the Welfare State (2013-16) explored the implications of the declining welfare state for global politics, gender and race relations, and the future of democracy, imagining alternative models of life and new ways of thinking about the politics of the present.
Social Justice After the Welfare State
Project Directors: Alice Kessler-Harris, Premilla Nadasen
Social Justice After the Welfare State explored the implications of the rise of neoliberalism and declining welfare state in the US and elsewhere for American politics, gender and race relations. Some of the questions the working group set out to explore included: Is the idea of government social responsibility at a dead end? How has the role of the state shifted between the New Deal and the current era of neoliberalism? Are democratic values threatened by limits on social rights? Will we see increased emphasis on marriage, family, and individual responsibility as the source of economic support? These initial questions broke down into a variety of disturbing issues that the working group also grappled with: How have the struggles for women’s equality and racial diversity contributed to progressive social change but also masked other forms of inequality? How do we think about citizenship and rights in relation to labor migration, incarceration, education, and new reproductive technologies such as surrogacy? Will expanded benefits such as “family-friendly” policies exacerbate divisions among workers and simply create a larger pool of poorly paid labor? Or will such strategies contribute to a rethinking of the meaning of workplace justice? What about labor unions? What alternative labor organizing strategies have enhanced the political power of workers? What is the current state of social protest? Are Americans turning inward and finding individual coping mechanisms? Or are incipient movements a sign of emerging collective organization? Approaching its topic from a range of angles, the workshop cast its exploratory net on the impact of inequality on the future of American democracy.
Workshop: Shifting Notions of Social Citizenship: The “Two Wests”
June 11-13, 2014
Columbia Global Center | Paris
The workshop examined the impact of the widespread decline of the welfare state on long-standing claims to social citizenship, and consider consequences for democratic participation in Europe, and in the United States. Over the course of the twentieth century, expanding welfare states, most effectively (though differently) modeled in Western Europe, helped to guarantee economic security. In the quest for a more inclusive social citizenship, nation-states variously subsidized education, housing and family maintenance, as well as unemployment insurance, old age pensions, minimum wages, labor standards, the dole, and health care. These benefits or rights, helped to empower working people to participate in democratic governance. But the “welfare state” is now at risk, under the onslaught of a persuasive 'free market' ideology and the spread of global economies that reduce the regulatory capacities of nation-states. And so the question: Can we imagine the perpetuation of democracy in the face of a transformed welfare state? Social scientists and historians from the United States and different European countries met to explore how the decline of the welfare state will affect present and future conceptions of citizenship and political participation.
With the support of:
Interuniversity Center for European-American History and Politics (CISPEA); Department of Human Studies, University of Eastern Piedmont; Department of History, Columbia University; and the Alliance Program, Columbia University
Beyond Neoliberalism: Social Justice After the Welfare State
Saturday, April 2, 2016
Columbia University
Social Justice After the Welfare State, a workshop led by Alice Kessler-Harris and Premilla Nadasen in the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia, hosted a daylong symposium to explore the transformation of the welfare state and social movements in the face of neoliberal challenges. The group gathered considered the implications of this transformation for the political economy of class, gender, racism, and migration. Putting scholars in conversation with activists who address the fallout of neoliberalism on the ground, the symposium assessed the past, present, and future of government social responsibility and pays special attention to social rights and social justice.
With the support of:
Women Creating Change (Center for the Study of Social Difference); Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University; Department of History, Columbia University
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Engendering the Archive
Power determines what is conserved and what is lost, which stories have been committed to collective memory and which ones have been erased. Engendering the Archive (2008-15) brought this fundamental feminist insight to bear on the examination of archival practices in the arts, literature, history, social science and everyday life.
Engendering the Archive
Project Directors: Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Laura Wexler
Power determines what is conserved and what is lost, which stories have been committed to collective memory and which ones have been erased. Engendering the Archive brought this fundamental feminist insight to bear on the examination of archival practices in the arts, literature, history, social science and in the practice of everyday life. An interdisciplinary research project that consisted of working artists, documentarians, archivists, scholars, social analysts, and museum curators, Engendering the Archive explored the making of archives, specifically, the knowledge they afford and the question of what exceeds their grasp. This project stood out from other work on the archive because of its rigorous focus on the role of power in producing the archive and in positioning social groups unevenly in relation to the production of knowledge and the authority to speak.
Engendering the Archive was an interdisciplinary research project focusing on gender, sexuality, race, and archival practices. The working group looked at categories of social difference as inescapable aspects of differential power relations that determine what societies remember and what they forget. Focusing on key questions such as--What is an archive? Who or what authorizes its construction? How do archives contribute to the production of social and cultural difference? How does the development of new media radically change the way knowledge is classified, stored, and retrieved?—the project sought answers by taking advantage of theories and methods developed by contemporary artists, activists, and scholars of race, gender, and sexuality.
Engendering the Archive investigated some of these fundamental questions from a global perspective, taking into account of the role of racism and colonialism in the production of archives and of categories that make legible or erase particular events and experiences. Gender, along with race, sexuality, and class, are inescapable aspects of differential power relations that determine what societies remember and what they forget.
Participants included approximately 30 scholars, activists and cultural practitioners drawn from Columbia, from other colleges and universities in the greater New York area, and from abroad, as well as several Columbia graduate students.
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TOWARD AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF BLACK WOMEN
This research project was dedicated to recovering the history of black women as active intellectual subjects and to moving the study of black thought, culture, and leadership beyond the "Great Men" paradigm that characterizes most accounts of black intellectual activity, thus challenging the traditionally male dominated accounts of intellectual work.
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women
Project Directors: Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Barbara D. Savage
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women was a research project dedicated to recovering the history of black women as active intellectual subjects and to moving the study of black thought, culture, and leadership beyond the "Great Men" paradigm that characterizes most accounts of black intellectual activity. This project sought to define and promote black women's intellectual history as a legitimate field of academic inquiry, and in so doing to generate compelling scholarship that challenges the traditionally male dominated accounts of intellectual work. A collaborative effort designed to support the development of the next generation of scholars in this field, Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women examined the perception and construction of black intellectual leadership as male and African-American women's contributions to black thought, political mobilization, creative work and gender theory. This project also sought to create and sustain a community of scholars, nurture and mentor junior professors and graduate students, and help develop the leadership skills of young women.
In an effort to move the study of black thought, culture, and leadership beyond the “Great Men” paradigm that characterizes most accounts of black intellectual activity, we have initiated this three year research project. The goal of this project is to address the lack of attention given to the work of black women intellectuals historically and in the contemporary moment. In doing so we hope to challenge the perception and construction of black intellectual leadership as male and to explore African-American women’s contributions to black thought, political mobilization, creative work, gender theory and identity politics. In the course of the three-year project, we aim to generate a body of innovative scholarship on black women intellectuals that maps the distinctive ways in which black women have engaged and challenged the ideas of both white American intellectual traditions and the racial and political ideas of black male thinkers. Designed to support the development of the next generation of scholars in this field, our project brings together scholars at different stages in their careers. With this end in mind, we hosted a preliminary brainstorming meeting in the spring of 2006. Twenty-two scholars attended this first meeting. Participants assessed the state of the field today, shared descriptions of their individual research projects and set goals for the outcome of the project. We plan to convene more times over a period of three years to address this tremendous void in the field of African American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, African Studies, American Studies and American History. In the first year of the project we will hold a day long symposium for participants of the April meeting to share their works in progress. The following summer we plan to host a week long workshop that will focus on finalizing drafts for a volume on Black Women’s Intellectual History. In the third year of the project we plan to host an international public conference. Participants, members of the working group as well as those who have responded to a call for papers, will present their work to the larger public. Following the conference we plan to gather some of the essays for publication. We will also include sample syllabi and reading lists in the appendices. During the course of this working group we hope to encourage and generate scholarship on black women as intellectuals. Working as a collective, we hope to piece together a history of black women’s thought and culture, that examines the distinctive concerns and historical forces that have shaped black women’s ideas and intellectual activities. To this end, we are interested in subjects such as the genealogy of black feminism, the patterns of women’s leadership and theological commitments in the black church, the politics of black women’s literature, and the history of black women’s racial thought. In addition to assembling the collection of essays that will appear in our volume, we want to provide intellectual support for individual projects, to help the development and creation of courses and syllabi and most importantly, encourage the work of younger scholars in this area. Our project aims to define and promote black women’s intellectual history as a field, and in so doing to generate compelling scholarship that challenges the traditionally male dominated accounts of intellectual work. We also believe that in taking on this important and much neglected subject we will help to create and sustain a community of scholars, nurture and mentor junior professors and graduate students and help to develop the leadership skills of young women.
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Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change
This project brought together a wide range of feminist scholars who work on the problem of women, vulnerability, and social change with an eye to understanding both the risks of establishing women as a vulnerable population, the tactical deployment of the status of vulnerability, and the promise of developing new modes of collective agency that do not deny vulnerability as a resource.
Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change
Director: Judith Butler
This project brought together a wide range of feminist scholars who work on the problem of women, vulnerability, and social change with an eye to understanding both the risks of establishing women as a vulnerable population (especially when, according to nationalist norms, some women are regarded as vulnerable, and minority women are not), the tactical deployment of the status of vulnerability, and the promise of developing new modes of collective agency that do not deny vulnerability as a resource. It considered both the power differential and modes of agency among women that mobilize vulnerability within tactics of resistance. In other words, this group sought to understand global practices of social change that emerge from conditions of social and economic vulnerability, and that demonstrate the relation between vulnerability and political agency. Topics included a gendered analysis of war, literacy and education, and economic precarity and inequality, with the hope of identifying sites of social vulnerability and modes of social change. A goal of the project was to bring together artists, critics, and philosophers who offer theoretical perspectives on the sources of social change, focusing on modes of alliance that are characterized by interdependency and public action. The group also asked about the gendering of perceived or marked vulnerabilities and how they function to expand or justify those structures of power that seek to achieve ethnic, economic or cultural-religious dominance in specific social contexts.
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