Past Events
Join the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race for our end-of-semester holiday party! Dinner will be catered from Massawa. We encourage CSER students and faculty especially to attend for an evening of community and celebration.
3:00-4:15: WRITING AND TEACHING IN GAZA: DR. REFAAT’S LEGACY
Moderated by Thea Abu El-Haj
Jehad Abusalim, Executive Director, Institute for Palestine Studies USA
Yousef Al Jamal, writer from Gaza
Eman Bashir, Gazan writer and researcher
4:15-4:45: COFFEE AND READINGS
Readings by CU, BC students
Coffee by Qahwah House
4:45-6:00: BLACK PALESTINE AND TRANSNATIONAL SOLIDARITIES
Moderated by Frank Guridy
Marc Lamont Hill, American academic, author, activist
Maytha Alhassen, Syrian-American journalist, scholar, and poet
Ali Mir, writer and lyricist
6:00-7:00: DINNER SERVICE BY ABU RAS
7:00-8:15: WRITING AGAINST DISAPPEARANCE: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS
Moderated by Bahia Munem
Yahya Ashour, Gazan poet
Hind Shoufani, Palestinian filmmaker and writer
Jumana Manna, Palestinian visual artist
Part of the Columbia Oral History MA Program’s 2024-25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series:
A Conversation on Black Archives [Virtual Event]
Black Archives is a “gathering place for Black memory and imagination.” Charlie is a research-based visual artist and author of Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life (2023). Current project: In the summer of 1977, the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress established the South-Central Georgia Folklife Project. Cherlise’s work examines the fieldwork practice of Dr. Beverly J. Robinson, educator, and folklorist, who documented the communities and traditions of rural southern Georgia.
Renata Cherlise is a research-based visual artist and author of Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life (2023). Cherlise uses various mediums to explore themes of identity, family, and culture. Her work seamlessly bridges her Southern upbringing with contemporary methodologies in digital and physical spaces while reimagining notions of the Black experience. Her archival project, Black Archives, has evolved from a photo-based website of visual narratives into a collaborative platform featuring archival histories and modern-day stories from across the African diaspora.
Justice Forum at the Heyman Center for the Humanities presents a discussion with Medar de la Cruz and Thai Jones. Thai and Medar will discuss their experiences working in libraries. Thai’s familiarity with academia and Medar’s involvement providing book cart services at Rikers Island will highlight the consequences of the justice system in the context of information accessibility. This talk will open up a larger conversation on how to bridge the gap from university archives to public resources.
Speakers
Medar de la Cruz is a Dominican-American cartoonist and illustrator born in Miami, Florida, and currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with a degree in illustration from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and has worked as a freelance illustrator for The New York Times and The New Yorker. Medar has recently been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a comic he illustrated and wrote, published in The New Yorker about his experience working for the Outreach Department at the Brooklyn Public Library, where he provided book cart services at Rikers Island.
Thai Jones is the Curator for History at Columbia University’s archive. He teaches critical research methods and the history of radicalism and is the author of several books, including More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2014) and A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience (Free Press, 2004). He served as historical consultant and co-writer on the award-winning podcast Mother Country Radicals (2022). His writing has appeared in a variety of national U.S. publications, including The New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Nation, and the Occupied Wall Street Journal.
NOTE: If you are a Columbia/Barnard affiliate with campus access, please use your Columbia/Barnard email when registering.
All external guests must have their OWN registration and email address.
Professor Carlos Alonso Nugent will give a talk titled “Whiteness and/as Water Infrastructure along the Colorado River” on Tuesday, December 3rd at 5pm in Schermerhorn 754. A reception with refreshment will follow. If you are not a Columbia affiliate but would like to attend, or if you would like to attend virtually, please contact Benjamin Hulett at bnh2130@columbia.edu.
With the US–Mexico borderlands running out of water, many are blaming the politicians who passed imprudent laws and the bureaucrats who built destructive dams. But by following such figures to smoke-filled rooms, academics and activists have overlooked the media that popularized water (mis)management. Engaging everything from the promotional print culture of the Southern Pacific Railway to the “Prize Odes” performed at International Irrigation Congresses, this talk explains how Anglo Americans came to feel entitled to Indigenous land, racialized labor, and the “magic touch of water.” Moving from Reconstruction to the New Deal, the talk thus reconstructs the rise of environmental obliviousness, which is my term for the experiential repertoires that naturalize our constant consumption of earth, water, plants, animals, and ultimately other people.
Lehman Suite, International Affairs Building 406
Founded by the late poet and activist June Jordan in 1991, P4P explores how reading, writing, and teaching poetry can help people grow both individually and together in community. Jordan’s guidance for crafting poetry emphasizes maximum impact with minimum words. Professor Samiya Bashir, a poet and direct student of Jordan, centers her P4P curriculum on the poetry of African American and American Poets of Color, as well as contemporary African poets. As part of extending P4P’s legacy of bridging the gap between universities and the larger communities they serve, Professor Bashir equips her students with the tools to use poetry workshops as a vehicle of social justice in schools, community organizations, and activist projects, such as the Justice-in-Education Initiative, which organizes educational programming for formerly incarcerated scholars.
Join the CSER Student Advisory Board and ethnic studies journal Roots for an evening showcasing student performances and art! Visit Instagram (@csersabcolmbia and @cseroots) for more information.
AAPI Interboard presents: Nourishing Roots, a free community dinner and conversation featuring Damayan Migrant Workers on Friday, November 15th between 5:00-7:00 PM. This is the first installation of AAPI Interboardʻs our “Nourishing Roots” series, a series sponsored by the Barnard DEI Grant. The meal will be catered by Tradisyon, a local Filipino restaurant, and held along with a tableside conversation with members of Damayan, a grassroots organization that serves and empowers low-wage Filipino migrant workers living and working in NYC and NJ.
Please use this form to RSVP in advance.
The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race presents “Reimagining Race and Technology,” a roundtable featuring emerging scholars working at the intersection of race and technology. Panelists will discuss how digital technology is deployed in war zones, how corporations manage access to democratic expression online, how digital surveillance works in U.S. higher education, and how race and racism appear in the digital collections at Columbia’s Libraries. Their presentations will be followed by conversation and audience Q&A. Please reach out to cser@columbia.edu with any questions.
Monday, November 11th at 5PM
CSER Seminar Room, 420 Hamilton Hall
Dinner will be provided!
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Ali Musleh is Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies here at Columbia. Prior to that, he was a researcher at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UH-M) Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies. In 2022, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at UHM, where he taught global politics and alternative futures. His first book project is titled To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel’s design, development, and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons, and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life.
Irina Kalinka is a Fellow, Society of Fellows at Columbia and a lecturer at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society as well as the Department of English and Comparative Literature. A scholar of political theory and digital media with a global purview, Irina centers her research around platform studies, democracy, and digital publics. She completed her dissertation, “The Political Imaginary of User Democracy,” in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2023. In this project, Irina argues that tech-corporations promote and engender their own normative conceptualization of democracy through the services they oversee.
Madi Whitman is the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Assistant Director of Curriculum Development in the Center for Science and Society and a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. As a sociocultural anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) researcher, Madi studies how technologies, institutions, and subjectivities are made together. This research is currently animated by questions about surveillance and marginality in changing regimes of data collection in higher education in the United States. Prior to coming to Columbia, Madi was involved in collaborations with the National Science Foundation Center for Science of Information. Madi earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Purdue University in 2020, and was previously a Visiting Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Brian Luna Lucero is the Digital Projects Librarian at Columbia University and a lecturer at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and in the History Department. He assists Columbia’s librarians and faculty in creating digital collections and exhibits from Columbia’s extensive physical archives. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of New Mexico in 2012. His dissertation, “Invention and Contention: Memory, Place, and Identity in the American Southwest, 1848-1940,” examines memory and commemoration of the Spanish colonial past in three Spanish settlements that grew into prominent American cities: Tucson, Arizona, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and San Antonio, Texas.
