‘Seeds of Diaspora’ will convene an interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners. Together, we will select a short list (5-8) of non-cultivated plants found in New York City, and consider how they each embody native and non-native landscape imaginaries.

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.

We are a group of scholars from across disciplines and institutions interested in bringing together the increasingly interrelated fields of Refugee Studies and Urban Studies. While there are few scholars or institutions that explicitly and intentionally consider these fields together, the expanding number of internationally displaced people settling in cities and interacting with and in urban spaces across the globe merits sustained engagement and analysis.

Questions of resource extraction are now front and center in almost every academic discipline across the humanities and social sciences. Propelled by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, scholars are reinventing their core research questions to ask how we came to this pass, and also where do we go from here? The Extractive Media working group seeks to take this conversation beyond fossil fuels to track the ways in which energy economies span continents and oceans, differentially affect unequal bodies and lives, and bleed across disparate sites such as the coal mine and the computer screen.

In accordance with the CSSD’s designated focus on Imagining Justice, our working group critically considers the circulations of “recovery” in arenas such as biomedicine, pandemic politics, climate change, economics, and other fields of governance. Aligned with current scholarly and activist efforts to think through the transformations in social relations required for meaningful versions of repair and recuperation, we are particularly interested in challenging presumptions of the feasibility/desirability of a return to a prior normative state. Instead, we aim to consider how a transformative justice approach might spur new imaginations of not only social justice but also embodiment, health, individual well-being and collective dis-ease.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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).