Our colleague Ayse Gül Altinay, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Center at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, was sentenced to 25 months in prison earlier this week. She is one of over 2200 Academics for Peace who three years ago signed a statement “We will not be a party to this crime” appealing for an end to violent state-sponsored persecution of Kurdish citizens of Turkey. The investigation in Istanbul has covered only the first 1200 signatories so far, but it might be extended to the second 1000 as well. In this, her fourth, judicial hearing, Altinay was charged with “willingly and knowingly supporting a terrorist organization as a non-member.” The court’s charge and thus the sentencing have no merit.
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On Wednesday March 13, 2019 days after International Women’s Day the Center for the Study of Social Difference’s Women Creating Changed hosted a roundtable discussion to explore the successes and limitations of policies to promote diversity and inclusion in the corporate sector. Held at Maison Francaise, the “Corporate Feminism & Its Discontents” roundtable included notable speakers such as Janice Ellig, Chief Executive Officer of the Ellig Group, Professor Yasmine Ergas, lecturer and director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy at the School of International and Public Affairs, Melissa Fisher, a cultural anthropologist who writes on finance, feminism, and the workplace, and Katherine Phillips, the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. + Read More

In advance of the Center for the Study of Social Difference’s (CSSD) Women Creating Change(WCC) five year anniversary roundtable on Thursday September 27th, the Women Creating Change Leadership Council (WCCLC) convened to review progress and discuss next steps. The WCCLC provides a critical link between the University’s faculty-led projects and  global business, academic, and civil society. It is comprised of individuals who are preeminent in the fields of business, law, government, nonprofit, social activism, and academia.
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This September marked not only the ten year anniversary of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) but, the five year anniversary of CSSD’s project Women Creating Change (WCC), one of two streams of research and galvanization that engages distinguished feminist scholars from diverse fields throughout Columbia University who focus on contemporary global problems affecting women and on the roles women play in addressing these problems. + Read More

The following is the prelude by Carol Becker (Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia) to the roundtable discussion “Arts of Intervention” at the anniversary conference of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD), “What We Can Do When There’s Nothing To Be Done: Strategies for Change,” which was held on September 28, 2018 at The Forum at Columbia University, New York, New York: + Read More

The following was written in response to the tenth anniversary symposium of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD), held at The Forum at Columbia on September 28, 2018, by Mayte López, Graduate Teaching Fellow in the PhD Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILaC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY: + Read More

On July 11, 2018, Simavi and WSSCC hosted a panel discussion during the UN’s High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, about “Putting Menstrual Health on the 2030 Agenda,” which featured Institute for the Study of Human Rights professor Dr. Inga Winkler as both the keynote speaker and a panelist. Dr. Winkler is director of the Menstrual Health and Gender Justice working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University.

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CSSD’s project on Reframing Gendered Violence was featured in the July issue of EuropeNow, which was dedicated to “The Gender of Power.” + Read More

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of CSSD’s working group on Unpayable Debt and award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, was profiled on Univision. + Read More

The second part of a MOOC created by Alice Kessler-Harris, past director of CSSD’s working group on Social Justice After the Welfare State and Professor of American History Emerita at Columbia University, was recently launched by Columbia and the Center for Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society. “Women Have Always Worked: The U.S. Experience 1700 – 1920” started this past fall and is available free to the public. View the MOOC here.

Marianne Hirsch, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and co-director of CSSD’s Reframing Gendered Violence working group, recently published an op-ed on the truthout website titled “Three Lessons About Autocracy I Learned as a Child in Communist Romania.” + Read More

CSSD recently announced the winners of its competition for media fellows joining its project on “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence.” Supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the project brings together an international community of scholars, practitioners, journalists, and activists to study the role of religion in naming, framing, and governing gendered violence, with a focus on the Middle East and South Asia. + Read More

Rebecca Jordan-Young, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and past director of CSSD’s working group on Science and Social Difference, recently published an article in The Guardian called “We’ve been labelled ‘anti-sex difference’ for demanding greater scientific rigour.” + Read More

On May Day, 2017, CSSD’s Unpayable Debt working group launched its PRSyllabus, a resource to study Puerto Rico’s $70 billion debt crisis in the context of over one hundred years of colonial governance by the United States. + Read More

The first part of the “Women Have Always Worked” MOOC (massive open online course), led by Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History Emerita at Columbia University and former project director of CSSD’s Social Justice After the Welfare State, was recently launched on the edX platform. + Read More

CSSD’S deadline for proposal submissions for 2017 projects has been extended to Monday, March 20th. Proposals may be submitted for consideration by any Columbia or Barnard faculty member(s) whose project aligns with the mission of CSSD.

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Anupama Rao, Associate Professor of History, Barnard College, and director of the recently completed CSSD project on Gender and the Global Slum, published an opinion piece in the New York Times on an Indian Supreme Court ruling that bans political appeals to identity.

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David Scott, Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Research in African American Studies, Columbia University, and former co-director of CSSD’s Digital Black Atlantic Project, received the Distinguished Editor prize from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for his work on Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.

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Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University and director of CSSD’s working group on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence, reviewed Katherine Zoepf’s Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World  in the latest issue of the Women’s Review of Books. + Read More

Laura Ciolkowski, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference and Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, was interviewed on the WFUV podcast “Issues Tank” on the subject of rape culture and “locker room talk.” + Read More

Laura Ciolkowski, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference and Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, published her Rape Culture Syllabus in the October 15th issue of Public Books. + Read More

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and director of the CSSD project on Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy, appeared on a CBS Sunday Morning program about “Latinos and the Vote.” + Read More

Rachel Adams, CSSD Director, Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University, and director of the CSSD project on Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics and Culture, recently published an article in the Independent on the universal ambivalence toward people with disabilities.

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CSSD is initiating a broad-based exploration of questions raised by precision medicine—an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person—in such fields as law, ethics, social sciences, and the humanities. + Read More

CSSD is housing a new three-year initiative on “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence,” to be co-directed by Professor Lila Abu-Lughod (Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality/Anthropology). + Read More

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and Project Director for CSSD’s project on  “Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy” recently appeared on an episode of HBO Latino’s “Habla y Vota” discussing Latinos’ influence on U.S. politics.

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Paige West, Professor of Anthropology at Barnard and Columbia and director of CSSD’s project on Pacific Climate Circuits and Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia and director of CSSD’s project on Gender, Religion, and Law in Muslim Societies, were featured in the recent Atlantic article “The Invisible Labor of Women’s Studies.” + Read More

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, co-director of the CSSD project “The Rural Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya” and University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, was recently interviewed by the New York Times for an article on the nature of violence among marginalized people. + Read More