Publications

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

Susan Meiselas, photographer and member of CSSD’s Women Mobilizing Memory and Reframing Gendered Violence working groups, was recently featured in an article in The Guardian about A Room of Their Own, her new book of photos documenting residents of women’s refuges in Black Country, England. + Read More

Tina Campt‘s Listening to Images, soon to be published by Duke University Press, was originally conceived in the CSSD project she co-directed called Engendering the Archives. + Read More

Josef Sorett, Associate Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Columbia University and former CSSD executive committee member, was featured in an interview on the African American Intellectual History Society blog.

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The volume Vulnerability in Resistance, which grew out of the workshop “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change” that took place at Columbia’s Global Center in Istanbul in 2013, has been published by Duke University Press.  The introduction to the volume is available here, free of charge.

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Josef Sorett, member of CSSD’s Executive Committee, Assistant Professor of Religion and African-American Studies and Associate Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Columbia University, just published a blog entry in HuffPost Black Voices called “Faith in a New Black Future.” + Read More

Premilla Nadasen, project co-director for CSSD’s working group Social Justice After the Welfare State and Visiting Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, recently published an article in Jacobin Magazine explaining how the Clinton Administration simultaneously criminalized and racialized poverty by enacting two extremely detrimental policies. + Read More

Rachel Adams, CSSD director, director of the “Future of Disabilities Studies” working group, and Columbia English and American Studies professor, recently published an article in Huffington Post about building disability literacy in children. + Read More

Strong reviews from feminist, trade, and mainstream press for Premilla Nadasen’s Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement.  Nadasen is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College and co-director of CSSD’s working group on Social Justice After the Welfare State. + Read More

Lila Abu-Lughod, project director of CSSD’s Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies working group and Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, recently edited a special forum called “The Politics of Feminist Politics” for the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. + Read More

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, director of CSSD’s working group on “The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories” and Columbia University Professor in the Humanities, retranslated the recently published fortieth anniversary edition of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, the seminal text on deconstruction. + Read More

Amina Tawasil, Visiting Lecturer at the International Studies Institute, University of New Mexico and member of the CSSD working group on Gender, Religion and Law in Muslim Societies, recently published research in the Journal of Women of the Middle East and Islamic World entitled “Towards the Ideal Revolutionary Shi’i Woman: The Howzevi (Seminarian), the Requisites of Marriage and Islamic Education in Iran.” + Read More

The European Journal of Women’s Studies (EJWS) recently published a special issue on gender and genocide that was co-edited by Ayşe Gül Altınay, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Sabanci University, and a member of CSSD’s Women Mobilizing Memory working group. + Read More

Future of Disability Studies project director Rachel Adams has co-edited Keywords for Disability Studies with Benjamin Reiss (Emory University) and David H. Serlin (UCSD).  + Read More

Rachel Adams, director of the CSSD working group The Future of Disabilities Studies has published an article in Reuters on the problem of disabled individuals’ unfettered access to assistance. + Read More

Rebecca Jordan-Young, director of the CSSD working group on Science and Social Difference and Tow Associate Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, has published an important article in Science magazine on the controversy and science surrounding levels of testosterone in female athletes. + Read More

Feminist art journal n.paradoxa recently published an interview with Ayşe Gül Altınay and Işın Önol, curators of the successful exhibition “Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing.”   + Read More

In April Essence magazine ran an interview with Toni Morrison by Farah Jasmine Griffin, director of the CSSD working group “Toward and Intellectual History of Black Women” and William B. Ransford Professor of English & Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia. + Read More

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, edited by Farah J. Griffin, co-director of the CSSD working group of the same name and Professor of English and African-American Studies at Columbia University, has been published by University of North Carolina Press.   + Read More

Yarimar Bonilla of the Digital Black Atlantic Working Group and Jonathan Rosa have published “#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States” in the January 2015 issue of the American Ethnologist.

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Anu Rao, Project Director of the Women Creating Change working group “Gender & the Global Slum” reflects on female leadership, labor, and women’s lives in India.

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In 2009, the South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya was barred from competition and obliged to undergo intrusive and humiliating “sex testing” after fellow athletes at the Berlin World Championships questioned her sex. Ms. Semenya was eventually allowed to compete again, but the incident opened the world’s eyes to the process of sex testing and the distress it could bring to an athlete who had lived her whole life as a girl. When an endocrinologist, a gynecologist and a psychologist were brought in to determine whether the teenager was really a woman, she simply asserted, “I know who I am.”

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