News and Announcements
Thursday, June 12, 2025
The 2025 immersion Program (27 May to 6 June 2025) was successfully completed on June 6th.
Grandmother Clara Soaring Hawk, Ambassador of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, offered an opening ceremony.
The Program was organized by Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) and cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) and the Department of International and Comparative Education at Teachers College. CSER and Teachers College were generous supporting partners from the beginning. Among other things, CSER generously provided its seminar room for our classes at Columbia. The International and Comparative Education Program at Teachers College offered the expertise of Professor Prem Phyak in linguistic human rights and identified two PhD researchers who participated as auditors during the Program.
The Program enjoys the cosponsorship and collaboration of the University of British Columbia in Canada, University of Toronto and the University of Auckland in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Those universities supported three excellent professors who taught several classes: Professor Claire Charters, Professor Andrew Erueti and Professor Sheryl Lightfoot. They also funded three graduate researcher participants. In addition, Professors and instructors from other universities and institutions offered seminars on a variety of topics composing the rich curriculum.
This is an immersion program and participants were expected to devote some seven hours daily to the Program. The course encouraged team learning and synergy by creating a community atmosphere among participants.
There were twenty-six lectures and workshops in a two-week period, including sessions with officials of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe and others in the community as well as sessions with UN officials. In addition, there were seven participants’ panels. The Program provided 65 hours of lectures, workshops, seminars and related activities. It offered an overview and analysis of the major questions in Indigenous affairs today, as they have emerged globally in the last decades and as they have been put forward by the Indigenous Peoples’ movement, culminating in the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and efforts towards its implementation.
Participants: After an unprecedented number of applications, some 195, we had 19 participants from 11 countries and 14 Indigenous nations. Participants were mid- to high-level professionals in different fields (academia, civil service, Indigenous authorities, non-governmental organizations, foundations).
Field visit to Akwesasne, St. Regis Mohawk Tribe: The two-day visit was characterized as “life-changing” by many participants in their evaluations. The authorities and other actors in the community opened their doors to us, discussed their issues and shared their visions and actions.
Visit to the UN: Three speakers addressed our group: the Acting Chief of the Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues; the Senior Policy Adviser, in the Indigenous Peoples and Local Community Engagement of the United Nations Development Program; and the Minister Counselor of the Permanent Mission of Brazil to the United Nations. We also had a special tour of UN Headquarters.
Future of the Program: The Program has taken place at Columbia since 2013. We appreciate and are honored that about 250 people, and their organizations and institutions from around the world, placed their trust in us and joined this Program over the years, strengthening the community for Indigenous Peoples’ rights. We look forward to seeing this Program continue.
Elsa Stamatopoulou
Academic Coordinator of the International Program on Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Policy, 2013-2025
Professor Mae Ngai discussed threats by the Trump administration to terminate visas of Chinese international students at a webinar sponsored by UCLA Center for Chinese Studies on June 5. Watch the recording here!
The film White with Fear, which features CSER’s Mae Ngai, was recently released on-demand streaming platforms including Amazon, Apple, and VUDU. The film has a 93% “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
CSER’s writer-in-residence Marie Myung-Ok Lee is slated to give a convocation speech at Carleton College, titled “Acceptance versus Belonging and the Life You Want to Live.” Read more here!
CSER Writer-in-Residence Marie Myung-Ok Lee was recently elected as VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the National Book Critics Circle! See more here.
CSER’s Mae Ngai was featured in a HuffPost article called “Trump’s Brutal Immigration Agenda Has No Precedent,” published on April 30, 2025. Read it here!
CSER professor Ed Morales recently published an article in The Nation titled “How New York Can Help End the Global Debt Crisis.” The piece is a Q&A with Joseph Stiglitz and Martin Guzman, two economics professors at SIPA, about a proposed NYS law to reform policies about sovereign debt in the Global South. Read it here!
CSER’s Professor Carlos Alonso Nugent co-edited a “Forum” in the latest issue of American Quarterly, “Solidarity in Incommensurability: Ethnic Studies and the Environmental Humanities” (77.1). With an introduction co-written by Professor Nugent and Michelle N. Huang, as well as five other essays, the “Forum” spans pages 133-188. Read it here!
Mae Ngai gave a talk on the Trump administration’s agenda on birthright citizenship and mass deportation to the Paris chapter of Democrats Abroad on Feb 26.
CSER’s Mae Ngai was interviewed on Background Briefing, a nationally syndicated radio show, on the unfolding events in the Trump administration.
CSER’s Mae Ngai was featured in a segment by Democracy Now! on birthright citizenship.
Professor Mae Ngai published a piece called “Trump’s executive order to curtail birthright citizenship is part of the long history of ‘alien citizenship’ in the US” in the London School of Economics and Political Science blog.
CSER’s Professor Mae Ngai participated in a global webinar on Trump’s inauguration and America’s future, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.
CSER’s Marie Myung-Ok Lee published an article in The New York Times titled “My K-Drama Pilgrimage.” Read it here.
Professor Mae Ngai published an article in The Atlantic titled “A New Bracero Program is Not the Solution.” Read it here.
Interested in Ethnic & Race Studies and/or podcast production? We encourage you to apply to “In Color”, the newly minted in-house CSER Audio Programme. “In Color” is committed to providing a student-led space dedicated to amplifying discourse and concepts cultivated within the field of Race & Ethnic Studies. With a focus on showcasing the significance of ethnic and race studies in navigating the complexities of our world, our podcast marries the distinct perspectives of current CSER students with the center’s curriculum insights and professorial guest speakers. We are looking for passionate and motivated individuals to join our team and help in the creation of this new space in our vibrant CSER community. If you are interested in podcast production, building professional connections and marketing skills, or engaging in dialogue and research around critical and contemporary issues in the world of ethnicity and race, we warmly invite you to apply to join our team! Applications are due January 15th, and are open to all!
Established within the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER), this journal is a unique space for academic and creative work directly related to the intersection of several axes of identity—namely race, ethnicity, sex, class, and ability. Open to students both undergraduate and graduate, this journal rejects the rigid boundaries of traditional scholarship and welcomes the interdisciplinary creations of the larger Columbia/Barnard community. Our desire to anchor Ethnicity and Race scholarship—and the students who conduct it—as essential to the fabric of Columbia University.
Submissions are now open for Roots’ 2nd issue, themed “Borderlands.” Our submission window is open from 20 November 2024 to 20 January 2025, 11:59 p.m. EST.
We invite undergraduate/graduate students to think through the Borderlands with Roots. What happens to our bodies/minds/scholarship/language/etc. when bisected by a border? Drawing from the words of poet-scholar-activist Gloria Anzaldúa, we approach the Borderlands as “physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.” To explore these overlaps, Roots is seeking academic and creative output of any and all disciplines (inter- and trans-disciplinary modes), with an emphasis on the study of ethnicity & race.
“To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras [without borders]
Be a crossroads.”
– Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Keywords: mutation; transgression; malleability; interdisciplinary; “a new consciousness” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 80); cross-genre, trans-genre, transcending names, labels, categories; existing in the -ish; “hyphenated American;” gender; magical realism; nation-state; borders; sovereignty; transnational; trans*; identity; indigeneity; form and content; the page as a border; the personal and/as the political.
Visual Art includes photography, drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, video (website only), etc. Maximum Submission: 5 respective works.
Academic Writing includes essays, interviews, ethnographies, etc. Submission Length: 1,000-4,000 words total. Includes multiple submissions.
Creative Writing includes poetry, prose, personal essays, fiction, plays, etc. Submission Length: 1-5 poems or 1,000-4,000 words total. Includes multiple submissions.
Again, submissions are due January 20, 2025. We encourage you to submit finished works as soon as possible. Applicants will be notified of their submission status via email. Submissions will be reviewed blindly by journal editors and selected for publication in either our physical journal and website (in full or excerpted), or website only.
Please direct submission questions to cserjournal@gmail.com.
Professor Mae Ngai was recently featured on 60 Minutes Overtime and MSNBC in a segment called, “The blueprint of Trumpʻs deportation plan: A questionable approach by Eisenhower.” Professor Ngai spoke about Donald Trump’s plans to use Pres. Eisenhower’s mass deportations in the 1950s as a model for deporting millions now.
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Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Writer in Residence at CSER, recently published a piece in Salon.com called “Like Tim Walz, we were also wrongly accused of abusing our special needs son.” Click here to read.
Mae Ngai’s new book, Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Years of Photographic Justice (coedited with Chee Wang Ng), was reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the PBS-News Hour.
Ngai also discussed the book in several interviews and podcasts, including They Call Us Bruce.
