CSSD Fellow Susan Meiselas Receives Honorary Doctorate from Columbia

Documentary photographer Susan Meiselas  and member of CSSD working group Women Mobilizing Memory recently received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Columbia University.

At Columbia’s dinner honoring the degree recipients, Meiselas said that the collaborative work of the group not only furthered interaction between the New York campus and the Columbia Global Centers in Istanbul and Santiago but also acted as a form of intervention.

Meiselas’ important documentary work on human rights abuses in Chile and among Kurdish populations in Turkey inspired exhibits that Women Mobilizing Memory produced in Istanbul and New York, according to project co-director Marianne Hirsch.

Meiselas’ attention to documenting individual stories as well as systemic injustice provides a powerful model for the group’s use of the arts as a feminist means of mobilizing memories of violence in the interest of social justice, said Hirsch.