Women Mobilizing Memory Collective Solidarity Statement on Artsakh
As scholars, artists and activists who are part of the transnational feminist Women Mobilizing Memory Collective sponsored by Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, we have studied the memories of violent histories in the interests of promoting peace, social justice, and a democratic future across the globe.
Today, we call for an immediate and lasting ceasefire between Azerbaijan and Nagorno- Karabagh.
Bombay and Indian Ocean Urbanisms Workshop: Themes, Logistical Challenges, and Opportunities
Workshop Themes and Goals
As a part of the Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City working group we hosted our Bombay and Indian Ocean Urbanisms workshop on Zoom with four sessions spread out over a week between 26 June and 3 July, 2020. Speakers and participants joined the workshop from the US, India, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Singapore, England, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. The full schedule, including presenter names and paper titles, can be found here. + Read More
Introducing The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies
It has been said so often it is now cliché—“menstruation is having its moment!” But what is this moment actually about? What are we talking about when we talk about menstruation?
The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies invites the reader to explore menstruation from nearly every possible angle, including dimensions that you might not yet have considered: the historical, political, embodied, cultural, religious, social, health, economic, artistic, literary and many more. With 72 chapters on more than 1000 pages, the Handbook-the first of its kind-establishes Critical Menstruation Studies as a rich field of research. + Read More
Feminist Curious Steps Through History: Illumination in Dark Times
March 8, International Women’s Day, marks a global moment when feminists walk, chant, sing, and dance together in celebration of the transformative power of solidarity and collective action. In 2020, Istanbul is witnessing a new version of this celebration in the form of a “women’s run” organized by the sports section of the Istanbul Municipality, which recently changed hands into feminist-friendly leadership. Dark times call for creative politics: with feminist marches and other forms of political demonstrations in urban public space being suppressed by the government, women will run on a feminist path! And, much to our delight, the path of this women’s run has partially been inspired by the Curious Steps: Gender and Memory Walks of Istanbul.
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Shirley Sun: “Should We Be Worried About Racialization of Precision Medicine?”
Dr. Shirley Sun, Associate Professor of Sociology with joint courtesy appointments at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine and the School of Biological Sciences at NTU gave a presentation on December 4, 2019 hosted by the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture working group on the racialization of precision medicine. + Read More
Do Menstrual Health and Hygiene Policies Matter? – A Human Rights Assessment
In November 2019, Kenya adopted the world’s first stand-alone policy on menstrual hygiene. India has been integrating menstrual hygiene efforts in its sanitation policies for more than 10 years. And in the United States, we are counting down the States that still tax menstrual products. – These are just some of the policy developments in the menstrual health space. + Read More
Women Mobilizing Memory in Harlem
In September 2014, vendors hawked mussels and shoppers slipped into H&M while Women Mobilizing Memory moved with a different purpose through Istanbul’s Istiklal Street. Our CSSD working group was embarking on a “gendered memory walk,” an activist-scholar intervention coined by our counterparts in Turkey. Ayşe Gül Altınay, anthropology professor and Director of SU Gender at Sabancı University, and several graduate fellows, including Bürge Abiral, Armanc Yildiz, and Dilara Çalışkan, organized the walk as part of the Curious Steps Program. Their goal was to highlight memory sites central to political movements towards feminist and queer liberation that risked being subsumed in history and the changing face of the city. + Read More
On the Frontlines: A Student’s Reflections on Ebola Crisis Oral History Research Trip to Sierra Leone and Liberia
I had the privilege of joining the Center for the Study of Social Difference working group, On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics on a week long trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone and Monrovia, Liberia in August of 2019. While there, we recorded oral histories of nurses and midwives who were active during the Ebola crisis that afflicted both Sierra Leone and Liberia between 2014 and 2016. These interviews recorded perspectives from nurses working at the level of ministries of health, to those engaged on the front-lines. Nurses interviewed included some who treated the earliest cases, and others who were there as the last patients were discharged from the Ebola treatment centers. Two of the nurses interviewed were themselves survivors of Ebola and everyone the project encountered had a personal story of loss from that time. + Read More
Statement of Support for Ayse Gül Altinay from the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference and Women Creating Change
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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Disrupting Money: Puerto Rican Community Currency Project Makes Its Way to New York for the 2019 Loisaida Festival
Following a successful launch earlier this year, Puerto Rican artists will begin circulating Puerto Rican ‘pesos’ at the Lower Manhattan Festival ahead of one-month residency in the city.
RGFGV Conference Report on “Global Governance of the Intimate”
The project on Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence (RGFGV) convened a major international workshop on September 7-8, 2018. Global Governance of the Intimate was the second in a series of international workshops that opened with workshop in Amman a year earlier, hosted at the Columbia Global Center | Middle East, Amman. A group of twenty-five scholars, journalists, lawyers and activists met for two intensive days of collaborative research sharing and brainstorming at Columbia University in New York City.
Women Creating Change Hosts Corporate Feminism & Its Discontents Round Table
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
Reframing Transgender Violence: Notes from a Two-Day Workshop
On January 24-25, 2019, the Center for the Study of Social Difference presented its final scheduled public workshop in the first iteration of its Reframing Gendered Violence working group. Reframing Transgender Violence was organized by Nash Professor of Law Kendall Thomas and featured scholars, activists, attorneys, and graduate students working across issues of transgender violence and justice.
The Pedagogy of Dignity: Prison Education, Part 2 Event Recap
On Sunday September 30th 2018, the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University hosted its second Pedagogy of Dignity workshop at Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts, in connection with the Pedagogies of Dignity working group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference. The workshop brought together 40 formerly incarcerated students, academics, prison educators, activists, undergraduates, and postgraduates, to discuss the benefits and challenges of prison education, present our pedagogical ideas, and prepare participants to teach in Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC).
Unpayable Debt: A Student’s Reflections on the Launch of Max Haiven’s Art After Money, Money After Art and Caribbean Debt Syllabus, Second Edition
On October 10, 2018, the Center for the Study of Social Difference working group Unpayable Debt held an event to launch scholar Max Haiven’s book, Art After Money, Money After Art, and the second edition of Caribbean Debt Syllabus, the only digital resource available to study the significant impact of debt in Caribbean’s past and present.
First Women Creating Change Leadership Council Meeting of the 2018 - 2019 Academic Year
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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CSSD Working Group Unpayable Debt launch of Caribbean Syllabus: Second Edition and Max Haiven’s “Art After Money, Money After Art”
On October 10, 2018, the working group, Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence and the New Global Economy, led by professors Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Sarah Muir, hosted a launch event for the Second Edition of the #NoMoreDebt: Caribbean Syllabus. The group also launched the book Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization by Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media, and Social Justice at Lakehead University.
Women Creating Change (WCC) Celebrates Fifth Anniversary
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
Introduction to “Arts of Intervention” panel featuring Ricardo Dominguez, Sama Alshaibi, Miya Masaoka, and Saidiya Hartman
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
Of Waves, Tides and (Feminist) Tsunamis: a Student Response to What We CAN Do When There’s Nothing To Be Done
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
Menstrual Health and Gender Justice Working Group Launches with Expert Panel: Menstruation is Having its Moment – How Can Scholars Engage?
On September 20, 2018, the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights sponsored the launch of a new CSSD working group: Menstrual Health and Gender Justice. The event featured an expert panel addressing some of the most pressing questions related to menstrual health. + Read More
Professor Inga Winkler Speaks at UN Event on Menstrual Health
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.