Join the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) for our 18th annual symposium, featuring presentations by senior thesis writers majoring in Ethnicity and Race Studies! Lunch will be provided.
The theme of this year’s symposium is: “Communities in Conversation: Pathways to Identities, Movement(s), and Memories”
RSVP HERE! Open to the public; email cser@columbia.edu with any questions.
Coming on the heels of the MMUF Distinguished Lecture with Dr. Christopher Loperena, join Neriko Doerr and Devin Walker for a lunchtime conversation on the politics, challenges, and best practices associated with crafting ethical student travel experiences for the 21st century.
This event is hosted by BCRW’s Africana Routes, Africana Migrations faculty working group convened by Abosede George and Tamara J. Walker, who will also be moderating the conversation. For the past two years, the group has been creating spaces for knowledge sharing on the intersections of gender, race, travel, ethics, and institutional practice across the Barnard community and with external participants. Building on Doerr’s prescriptions in Transforming Study Abroad: A Handbook and Walker’s critical observations in Historically Underrepresented Faculty and Students in Education Abroad: Wandering Where we Belong, George and Walker are advancing towards a framework that interrogates and improves existing modes of international engagement within the curriculum and beyond.
Lunch will be provided. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
LOOK! : a graduate student workshop, presented by the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender
Frantz Fanon’s seminal essay “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” begins with an imperative: “Look!” This command cascades through the essay, exploding Fanon’s prose as both a mode of violence and a demand for recognition. Pinned by the white child’s look, Fanon is transformed into an “object among other objects” and denied the reciprocal recognition that might otherwise establish him as a subject. In turn, he converts himself into an object of knowledge, inhabiting the very terms by which he was seen: “Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known.” This tension between looking and knowing strikes at the heart of a Western philosophical tradition that has long conflated visibility with truth — and it is here that Fanon’s essay becomes a critical site through which we might better apprehend the sedimented aesthetic logics that underwrite our contemporary order.
In this graduate student workshop, we take up the politics and ethics of looking, with particular attention to the aesthetic, historical, and racial grammars that shape visual perception. What are the effects of looking and being looked at? What forms of power—racial, sexual, gendered, colonial—are implicit in the event when one is hailed to look or hailed by a look? How does looking differ from seeing, gazing, or staring? How might we understand a look as distinct from the gaze? What are the historical and epistemic conditions under which looking is possible, prohibited, or compelled? And what forms of refusal, opacity, or self-fashioning emerge when the objects of perception look back?
This workshop aims to bring together participants across fields spanning (but not limited to) literary studies, Black studies, art history, film & media studies, cultural theory, studies in gender & sexuality, theater and performance studies, disability studies, and aesthetic philosophy. We are especially interested in work that engages:
- the shifting grammars of looking across aesthetic, archival, or historical contexts;
- the visuality of race, gender, and sexuality;
- practices of witnessing, spectatorship, and surveillance;
- opacity, refusal, and practices of looking away;
- looking as interpellation, address, or demand;
- the relationship between surface, style, and embodied perception;
- the ethics and politics of being rendered visible or invisible.
Conference Schedule
Friday, April 17th
- 2:00–4:00pm. Guided Tour of the Studio Museum
- 4:30–6pm. Keynote address by Rachel Grace Newman
Saturday, April 18th
- 9:30am. Coffee and pastries available
- 10–11:15am. In Living Color: On Blackness, Form, and Poetics with Jay Gao (Columbia), Sofia Smith (Brown), and Desiree McCary (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary)
- 11:30–12:45pm. Sensational Film: On Cinema, Perception, and Aesthetic Vulnerability with Madelyn Neal (NYU), Amira Olinguo (Brown), and Amy Poncher (University of Southern California)
- 1–2:15pm. Lunch, which will be provided for registered attendees
- 2:30–3:45pm. The “Right to Look”: Ethnography, Surveillance, and Policing with Frances Cathryn (Columbia), Hayoung Lee (Columbia), and Pat Torres (Columbia)
- 4–5:15pm. Meaningful Moves: On Gesture, Exchange, and Transnational Performance with Daria Sadova (NYU), Lauren Stockmon Brown (Columbia), Isabella Pereira Nikel (Columbia)
New York City Asian American Student Conference (NYCAASC) is a student-run, non-profit organization, affiliated with Columbia’s Asian American Alliance and NYU’s Asian Heritage Month. We are dedicated to educating and empowering APIA youth from NYC to learn about and engage with current events—spaninng from grassroots organizing, community advocacy, and career-building opportunities.
Each year, we bring together around 100 high school and college students, creating a space to explore identity, learn about complex issues, and connect with others across NYC. This year we will be inviting keynote speakers: cinematographer Eric Lin & Dorothy Chow from the Death in Cambodia podcast.
Other workshop speakers include NYC Councilwoman Julie Won, Refugee advocate Jonathan Lam, Yuki Haraguchi from the W.O.W Project, and President of Stand with Asian Americans Rachel Lee.
Refreshments provided! Here is the link to register. The form will close on Friday, April 16th @ 11:59 PM, or until capacity. Please reach out to nycaasc.nyu@gmail.com or the directors, Morgan Yi (morgan.yi@mail.mcgill.ca) or Kate Mao (kjm2228@columbia.edu) with any questions or concerns.
Speakers: Chris Crawford (Interfaith America), Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds (Indiana University, Indianapolis), Kayla Renée Wheeler (Xavier University)
Learn more here and register here! Reception to follow.
Our national conversation remains divided: does religion advance civic causes and community based action or serve as a source of social difference and potential disruption? But the idea that religion either helps or hurts our civic life doesn’t capture the full picture. How can we push past hero-villain narratives to consider the ways religious forms and communities shape and share knowledge. Join IRCPL for a conversation with scholars and policymakers as we think together about the positives and the perils of viewing religion as a resource.
Join the Asian American Initiative for a conversation with author Ted Chiang and Professor Denise Cruz, Columbia University. Register here.
5:30pm Check-in
6:00pm Program Begins
7:00pm Reception
The Asian American Initiative at Columbia University is focused on making the experiences of Asian Americans central to our understanding of America. The goals of the initiative are to use evidenced-based research to drive change in our public narratives, and to forge a greater sense of belonging and pride for and among Asian Americans.
Jaquira Díaz, Assistant Professor of Writing, discusses her new novel, This is the Only Kingdom, with Edwidge Danticat, African American and African Diaspora Studies. Introduced by Sarah Cole, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature.
About This is the Only Kingdom:
When Maricarmen meets Rey el Cantante, beloved small-time Robin Hood and local musician on the rise, she begins to envision a life beyond the tight-knit community of el Caserío, Puerto Rico—beyond cleaning houses, beyond waiting tables, beyond the constant tug of war between the street hustlers and los camarones. But breaking free proves more difficult than she imagined, and she soon finds herself struggling to make a home for herself, for Rey, his young brother Tito, and eventually, their daughter Nena. Until one fateful day changes everything.
Fifteen years later, Maricarmen and Nena find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation as the community that once rallied to support Rey turns against them. Now Nena, a teenager haunted by loss and betrayal and exploring her sexual identity, must learn to fight for herself and her family in a world not always welcoming. For lovers of the Neapolitan novels, This is the Only Kingdom is an immersive and moving portrait of a family—and a community—torn apart by generational grief, and a powerful love letter to mothers, daughters, and the barrios that make them.
Tickets: https://events.leapevents.com/event/this-is-the-only-kingdom
Join ISERP on Friday, April 24 at Interchurch Center (suite 503) for an ISERP Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar Series on “Blackness across Geographies.” The workshop centers how formulations of Blackness appear and are grounded within local and global relations of power that construct racial differences. Another scope of the workshop is to bring forth underutilized or emerging concepts, e.g. Black dignity, grounded in African and Black diasporic experiences and histories. As such, we seek to continue an established lineage of work while exploring new concepts and frameworks that can push us forward in thinking about what Blackness is within contemporary broader scholarly racial-political frameworks.
The all-day workshop will feature papers by Columbia Ph.D. students in the social sciences and humanities on plantation afterlives, prisons and police, as well as Black self-determination and self-actualization. Dr. Audrey Célestine (NYU), Dr. Amelia Herbert (Barnard), and Dr. Jean Beaman (CUNY Graduate Center) will participate as discussants. The workshop will include lunch and a reception.
Please register at this link by April 21.
A special evening of literature, culture, and community at Casa Hispánica with New York Times Bestselling Author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Xochitl González to celebrate and discuss her newest novel, Last Night in Brooklyn.
Hosted by Dr. Nick J. Figueroa from the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, the Hispanic Institute, and the Latinos Urbanos Book Club, this intimate event brings together readers, book lovers, and the community for an engaging discussion with one of the most exciting literary voices writing today.
A proud Brooklyn native, Xochitl is the acclaimed author of Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs Last, works celebrated by The New York Times, TIME, NPR, and The Washington Post. In addition to her fiction, she is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where her cultural commentary earned her recognition as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary.
Her newest novel, Last Night in Brooklyn, continues her powerful exploration of identity, family, ambition, and the complexities of contemporary life – set against the vibrant backdrop of New York City.
Register Here For FREE = https://XochitlAtColumbia.eventbrite.com
