current projects
Our Projects
ENGENDERING THE ARCHIVE
Power determines what is conserved and what is lost, which stories have been committed to collective memory and which ones have been erased. Engendering the Archive brings this fundamental feminist insight to bear on the examination of archival practices in the arts, literature, history, social science and in the practice of everyday life. An interdisciplinary research project that consists of working artists, documentarians, archivists, scholars, social analysts, and museum curators, Engendering the Archive explores the making of archives, specifically, the knowledge they afford and the question of what exceeds their grasp. This project stands out from other work on the archive because of its rigorous focus on the role of power in producing the archive and in positioning social groups unevenly in relation to the production of knowledge and the authority to speak.
BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES
The Borders & Boundaries project is a unique interdisciplinary working group of scholars interested in re-examining current ways of thinking about global migration and developing new ways of conceptualizing the sociological, historical, economic, political, aesthetic and gender-specific dimensions of human mobility and social difference. Borders & Boundaries has as its premise a double paradox of contemporary life: the hardening of ethnic and racial boundaries at a time when goods and information flow across national borders quite freely, and the increasingly acute focus on racial differences at a time when race as a "scientific" or descriptive social category has become conspicuously unstable. The Borders and Boundaries project raises comparative questions concerning the ways in which international migrations - and border crossings of other kinds - relate to the formation and transformation of intra-societal boundaries such as race, class, gender and sexuality. Borders & Boundaries insists that gender/race/sexuality/class must be at the foundation of any global thought initiative and that global concerns must be at the foundation of the study of gender/race/sexuality/class.
TOWARD AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF BLACK WOMEN
Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women is a research project dedicated to recovering the history of black women as active intellectual subjects and to moving the study of black thought, culture, and leadership beyond the "Great Men" paradigm that characterizes most accounts of black intellectual activity. We seek to define and promote black women's intellectual history as a legitimate field of academic inquiry, and in so doing to generate compelling scholarship that challenges the traditionally male dominated accounts of intellectual work. A collaborative effort designed to support the development of the next generation of scholars in this field, Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women examines the perception and construction of black intellectual leadership as male and African-American women's contributions to black thought, political mobilization, creative work and gender theory. This project also seeks to create and sustain a community of scholars, nurture and mentor junior professors and graduate students, and help develop the leadership skills of young women.
Liberalism's Others uses the knowledges and practices of those marginalized in liberal or liberalizing polities in order to understand liberalism not as it imagines itself but as it is practiced. Combining humanistic methods to understand the meanings people attribute to their lives, including the concepts and categories that animate them, and ethnographic and analytical methods developed in the social sciences to track the relationships between individuals and institutions of governance, economic forces, and global dynamics, "Liberalism and its Others" brings together dynamic groups of historians, anthropologists, scholars of literature, law, politics, and health to explore alternative models of life and to develop new ways of thinking about the politics of the present. We draw on the deep intellectual resources of Columbia University, but collaborate closely with colleagues in Turkey, India, the UK and elsewhere, who are interested in exploring new social and political formations in the aftermath of decolonization and in the wake of neoliberal regimes.
