This project brings together faculty and graduate students with alums of Columbia’s prison education programs to think together about how to strengthen the courses and other educational opportunities Columbia presently offers to incarcerated students; to develop new courses and faculty training supports for those initiatives; and to think about and develop a more systematic set of classes to be offered to Columbia and Barnard undergraduates dealing with social justice and its relationship to carceral systems.
Black Atlantic Ecologies
The Black Atlantic Ecologies group supports and elaborates scholarship that centers the enduring effects of coloniality and the dynamic power of protest in African diasporic confrontations with environmental crisis. This group poses a single central question: How might Black Atlantic experience with peril, with perishment and with premature death offer a rubric for thinking futurity, including reproductive futurity, in a moment of environmental collapse?
Migrant Personhood and Rights: Crises of Recognition
This working group will explore the long-standing global crisis of recognition at the heart of anti-immigrant ideas and policies. It will focus on the discourses, practices, and institutions that actively deny immigrants recognition, as well as those discourses, practices, and institutions that recognize, support, and affirm migrants and their rights. They will engage with these issues in the areas of civics and education, immigration law and policy, and the characterization and treatment of migrants and refugees.
Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean
In response to the increasing power of the evangelical right in Latin America and the Caribbean, this project traces renewed interest in traditional and indigenous belief systems that have fueled struggles for environmental justice. These struggles rely on expressive and aesthetic forms such as ritual, song, and performance. These forms, in turn, give shape to new modes of imagining environmental justice. This comparative project is undertaken by a working group of scholars, artists and activists from Columbia University in collaboration with colleagues from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and Puerto Rico.
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.
Data Algorithms and Social Justice
The “Data, Algorithms, and Social Justice” working group catalyzes interdisciplinary dialogues and research into urgent contemporary issues around artificial intelligence, automated decision-making, power, and social change. In the twenty-first century, conceptions of social difference are shifting rapidly in response to the increasing influence of algorithms and automated decision-making processes, with profound impacts on employment, medical care, criminal justice, government services, and more. To effectively intervene in the injustices posed by our data-driven world will require new approaches and analytical tools, combining the critical lenses of the humanities with the skills of data scientists, programmers, statisticians, and more.
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.
Pedagogies of Dignity
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.
Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City
On The Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics
Racial Capitalism
Since its first usage by antiapartheid activists in South Africa to its elaboration by political theorist, Cedric J. Robinson, racial capitalism is a concept that delineates the interlinked relationships of race and class constitute of global capitalism. The racial capitalism working group is a site of sustained collaborative research and study. Our collective work is rooted in a commitment to Black radicalism, historical materialism, feminism, and anti-imperialism.
Queer Aqui
Queer Aqui is a CSSD working group to discuss, debate and investigate the politics of sexuality and gender in a global frame. This group builds upon a vast network of queer scholars worldwide to consider how best to resituate queer studies to respond to shifts in the meanings of family, sexual health, gendered embodiment, religion, sexual practices, gender variance, activism and sexual communities.
