Scholar and Feminist Conference: The Politics and Ethics of the Archive
Description | Register | Schedule | About the Exhibits | About the Workshops | About the Presenters | Accessibility | Books | Co-Sponsors
Keynote
Jarrett Drake
Literary Spotlight
Chinelo Okparanta and Akwaeke Emezi, with Yvette Christiansë
Featuring
Maira E. Álvarez, La Vaughn Belle, Elizabeth Castelli, Sebastián Castro Nicolescu, Yvette Christiansë, Maria Cotera, Jarrett Drake, Akwaeke Emezi, Molly Fair, Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, Che Gossett, Jennifer Guglielmo, Saidiya Hartman, Michelle Joffroy, Mariame Kaba, Steve Lang, Marie Lascu, Justin Leroy, Abram J. Lewis, Grace Lile, Robin Margolis, Marya Annette McQuirter, Laura McTighe, Melissa Morrone, Premilla Nadasen, Vani Natarajan, Miriam Neptune, Monique Tú Nguyen, Chinelo Okparanta, Shannon O’Neill, Riya Ortiz, Cara Page, Molly Rosner, Cameron Rowland, Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, C. Riley Snorton, and Martha Tenney.
Plus workshops with Borderlands Archives Cartography, the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, the NYC Trans Oral History Project, and XFR. Exhibits featuring Librarians and Archivists for Palestine, No Selves to Defend, The Medical Industrial Complex Timeline, and The Scholar and Feminist: An Interactive Archive.
Description
This year’s Scholar and Feminist conference builds on BCRW’s close collaboration with the Barnard College Archives to address the complex questions that circulate around the politics and ethics of archival work. Central to traditional scholarly work in reconstructing and interpreting the past, archives are perhaps even more crucial to the preservation of the stories and legacies of marginalized communities and political movements.
The S&F Conference will bring together archivists, librarians, artists, activists, and scholars to discuss the particular political and ethical challenges that reside in the project of creating archives for communities and social justice movements. How do we move beyond the notion of the archive as indifferent repository of textual, material, and digital materials and toward an archive of engagement? How can archival material be put to use to draw attention to muted histories and otherwise invisible networks of affiliation and connection? What difference do recent digital tools and capabilities make in the archiving and accessing of the past? How can archives empower communities to tell their own stories and offer others access to those stories while remaining critical of the risks of appropriation? What political and ethical questions weigh most heavily on the contemporary work of the archive?
In addition to traditional keynotes and panels, the conference will feature workshops and exhibits to introduce participants to the wide array of work taking place among communities and their archivists at the current moment.
Registration information
Registration is preferred but not required. Online registration will be open through the conference. In-person registration will be available beginning Friday, February 8 at 4 PM.
Please consider making a contribution with your registration. Your support makes our programming possible. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Conference Schedule
FRIDAY 2/8
4 PM: Registration
4:30 – 6 PM: “a map you/ will have to know by your intention”: Archival Exhibits
The exhibit opening will take place during this time. Exhibits will remain on view for the duration of the conference.
Librarians and Archivists with Palestine: 2013 Delegation
With Molly Fair, Grace Lile, Melissa Morrone, and Vani Natarajan
The Medical Industrial Complex Digital Timeline
Co-designed by Cara Page with Susan Raffo, and Anjali Taneja, shaped by other organizers and cultural workers including Project South, Sins Invalid and Leaving Evidence
No Selves to Defend
Conceived and curated by Mariame Kaba
The Scholar and Feminist Through the Decades: An Interactive Archive
Curated by Che Gossett, Marya McQuirter, Shannon O’Neill, and Martha Tenney
Title quote from Joy Harjo, “A Map to the Next World,” in A Map to the Next World. New York: Norton, 2000.
6:30 – 8 PM: Literary Spotlight: Chinelo Okparanta and Akwaeke Emezi, with Yvette Christiansë
“I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep”: A Reading and Conversation
Title quote from Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
8 – 9 PM: Reception
SATURDAY 2/9
9 – 10 AM: Registration and Breakfast
10 AM: Welcome
10:30 AM – 12 PM: “But words live in the spirit of her face and that/ sound will no longer yield to imperial erase”: Archiving Colonialism
Featuring La Vaughn Belle, Justin Leroy, Cameron Rowland, and C. Riley Snorton, moderated by Saidiya Hartman
Title quote from June Jordan, “A Song for Soweto” Copyright 2005 June M. Jordan Literary Estate Trust; reprinted by permission; www.junejordan.com.
12 – 1 PM: Lunch
Please pick up lunch in the designated lower level classroom(s) or in common area on the fifth floor. Lunch may be brought into classrooms during workshops.
12:30 – 2 PM: “a boat, even a wrecked and wretched boat/ still has all the possibilities of moving”: Workshops on Archival Practice
Dismantling the Toxic Discourses through Archives and Public Data
Facilitated by Maira E. Álvarez and Sylvia Fernández
Learning from Queensbridge: The Gardiner-Shenker Scholars Program
Facilitated by Amanda Jones, Molly Rosner, and Steve Lang, La Guardia and Wagner Archives
Community Oral History Interviewer Training with the NYC Trans Oral History Project
Facilitated by Sebastián Castro Niculescu and Abram J. Lewis
XFR Collective: All-Volunteer Community Centered Media Digitization and Access
Facilitated by Robin Margolis and Marie Lascu
Title quote from Dionne Brand, “Inventory,” in Inventory. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2013.
2 – 2:15 PM: Break
Coffee and tea will be provided in the lower level lobby.
2:15 – 3:30 PM: “Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past”: Case Studies in Archiving for Activist Movements
Panel discussion featuring Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, Laura McTighe, and Maria Cotera, moderated by Elizabeth Castelli
Title quote from Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007.
3:30 – 3:45 PM: Break
Coffee and tea will be provided in the lower level lobby.
3:45 – 5 PM: “Imagine a woman/ asking: How many workers/ for this freedom quilt”: Building an Archive of Domestic Worker Organizing, Now and Before
Panel discussion featuring Jennifer Guglielmo, Michelle Joffroy, Premilla Nadasen, Monique Tú Nguyen, Riya Ortiz, Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra, moderated by Miriam Neptune
Title quote from Sonia Sanchez, “Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman,” in Poetry, April 2018.
5 – 5:15 PM: Break
5:15 – 6:15: Graveyards of Exclusion: Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging
Keynote by Jarrett Drake
6:15 – 7 PM: Reception
About the Exhibits
Librarians and Archivists with Palestine: 2013 Delegation
With Grace Lile, Melissa Morrone, and Vani Natarajan
Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP) is a network of self-defined librarians, archivists, and information workers in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. In 2014, members of LAP worked with the art book house Booklyn to create a box set of art objects documenting the group’s 2013 Palestine delegation. For more details, visit Booklyn’s website at booklyn.org. Copies of the box set are available on loan to librarians and organizations interested in exhibiting the materials. Please email librarians2palestine@gmail.com.
The Medical Industrial Complex Digital Timeline
Co-designed by Cara Page with Susan Raffo, and Anjali Taneja, shaped by other organizers and cultural workers including Project South, Sins Invalid and Leaving Evidence
This timeline offers an excerpt of landmark legislation and policies that shaped the eugenic framing of public health, immigration reform, colonization, slavery, and surveillance.
No Selves to Defend
Conceived and curated by Mariame Kaba
‘No Selves to Defend’ shares snippets of the stories of Joan Little, Cassandra Peten, Rosa Lee Ingram and her children Sammie Lee Ingram and Wallace Ingram, Dessie Woods, Yvonne Wanrow, and Inez Garcia–Black, Indigenous, and Latinx women who were criminalized for defending their lives against violence. It also includes a pamphlet from the defense of Recy Taylor, a survivor of rape whose case preceded the others and built tremendous momentum for later struggles. This exhibit offers a space to examine the contested historical and contemporary understandings of self-defense, and traces a historical legacy of struggles that emerged to resist criminalization and demand freedom. The exhibit features original photographs, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and other ephemera from Kaba’s personal archival collections, as well as art from the original No Selves to Defend exhibit that took place at Art in These Times in Chicago in 2014. Attendees are invited to support a local survivor defense campaign, #FreeThemNY, which calls on Governor Cuomo to free all survivors of sexual and gender violence currently locked up in NY State prisons. For more on the #FreeThemNY campaign, visit freethemny.com.
The Scholar and Feminist Through the Decades: An Interactive Archive
Curated by Che Gossett, Marya McQuirter, Shannon O’Neill, and Martha Tenney
This interactive exhibit features clips, programs, photographs and other ephemera from past Scholar and Feminist Conferences since the founding of the Barnard Center for Research on Women in 1971. As an exercise in surfacing archival labor as well as critically engaging with it, attendees are invited to draw connections between the materials, create their own descriptions, and respond to the existing metadata.
About the Workshops
Dismantling the Toxic Discourses through Archives and Public Data
Facilitated by Maira E. Álvarez and Sylvia Fernández
Toxic discourses towards the U.S.-Mexico borderland and its communities have continuously altered history, social dynamics, culture, among other things that are part of this region. This workshop will go over the creation process of two social justice initiatives that utilize technology to respond to toxic discourses: Borderlands Archives Cartography (BAC), a transnational project dedicated to locate, map and facilitate access to nineteenth and mid-twentieth century borderlands newspapers; and Torn Apart / Separados a mobilized humanities project that intervenes in the United States’ immigration debates with data narratives illuminating the effects of the government’s policy of separating families, as well as data mining to follow the money behind the vast infrastructure subtending immigration enforcement. Participants will work with archives and public data, from the United States and Mexico, providing essential skills to ethically and critically organize, structure, create and visualize data through different platforms. Finally, this workshop follows Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga “theory in the flesh” practices, as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches in order to create resources that re-humanize the borderlands.
Learning from Queensbridge: The Gardiner-Shenker Scholars Program
Facilitated by Amanda Jones, Molly Rosner, and Steve Lang, La Guardia and Wagner Archives
In this workshop, participants will discuss the Voices of Queensbridge oral history project which grew out of the Gardiner-Shenker Research Program sponsored by the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives. In this one year project, three Social Science faculty members working closely with LaGuardia students, explored the history of public housing by using Queensbridge Houses and the Jacob Riis center program for seniors as a case study to learn about the past and present of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) through the eyes of long term residents. The project provided a valuable learning experience for students by enabling them to place tenants’ lived experiences in a larger historical, economic and political context. By conducting interviews of senior residents from the Riis Center and reflecting on their own experiences about participating in the project, students played a major role in bringing to fruition a powerful documentary film which explores the myths and realities of Queensbridge in both the past and the present. By focusing on the personal accounts of residents and highlighting their collective needs, concerns, hopes and fears, the film dispels stereotypes and misunderstandings attached to public housing.
The LaGuardia and Wagner Archives were established in 1982 to collect, preserve, and make available primary materials documenting the social and political history of New York City.
Community Oral History Interviewer Training with the NYC Trans Oral History Project
Facilitated by Sebastián Castro Niculescu and Abram J. Lewis
This workshop will delve into the NYC Trans Oral History Project’s methodology for collecting interviews with marginalized trans folks in New York City. As a project, we are firm believers the documentation of community oral history as assembling a set of knowledges useful to trans activism in the present. In this workshop NYC TOHP collective members AJ Lewis and Sebastián Castro Niculescu will tell you a bit about our project and archive, work on the skills of conducting oral history interviews, and give you the tools to be able to interview trans people in your life. We will go over our own approach to oral history interviewing, and discuss why the project seeks to expand accessibility of oral history methods to trans communities outside of institutional settings, to offer interview resources to all volunteers interested in contributing to the trans history of New York City. All are welcome.
The NYC Trans Oral History Project is a community archive that works to document transgender resistance and resilience in New York City. This project works to confront the erasure of trans lives and record diverse histories and experiences of gender as they intersect with race and racism, poverty, dis/ability, aging, housing migration, sexism, and the AIDS crisis, as well as the structural dismantling of public benefits, housing insecurity and homelessness, policing, and surveillance. Interviews are accessible to the public and part of the Creative Commons license for free and open use. NYC TOHP exists in partnership with the New York Public Library community oral history project, and is supported by the Digital Transgender Archive, and the Trans Justice Funding Project.
XFR Collective: XFR Collective: All-Volunteer Community Centered Media Digitization and Access
Facilitated by Robin Margolis and Marie Lascu
XFR Collective (xfrcollective.com) works to digitize and provide access to at-risk and obsolete audiovisual community media by providing low-cost transfer services to independent content creators for education, research and cultural engagement. At its core, XFR is designed to support the salvage, preservation, and circulation of born-analog media created by marginalized artists and organizations. XFR believes that archiving, preserving, and making accessible community media outside of the mainstream is essential for the creation of a more inclusive understanding of our past and present.
About the Presenters
Maira E. Álvarez is the Houston Director for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR) a national consortium of university-based centers dedicated to broadening the Latino intellectual presence in the US. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. Her research interests lie in the study of U.S. Latino/a, U.S.-Mexico Border, and Latin American Literature as well as Border and Women’s Studies, art, print culture, archives, and Digital Humanities. Maira is the co-founder of Borderlands Archives Cartography (BAC), a transnational archive that consists of a digital map that displays a U.S.-Mexico border cartography that records geographic locations of nineteenth and mid-twentieth century newspapers. She is also a team member of Torn Apart/Separados, a rapidly deployed critical data and visualization intervention in response to the US’s 2018 “Zero Tolerance Policy.” Maira is also a member of the forthcoming team-based digital humanities project United Fronteras.
La Vaughn Belle is best known for working with the coloniality of the Virgin Islands, both in its past relationship to Denmark and its present one with the United States. She works in a variety of disciplines that include: painting, installation, photography, video and public interventions. Borrowing from elements of architecture, history and archeology Belle creates narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and invisibility. She has exhibited her work in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe in institutions such as the Museo del Barrio (NY), Casa de las Americas (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (CA) and Christiansborg Palace (DK). Her art is in the collections of the National Photography Museum and the Vestsjælland Museum in Denmark. Her work with colonial era pottery led to a commision with the renowned brand of porcelain products, the Royal Copenhagen. She is the co-creator of “I Am Queen Mary”, the artist-led groundbreaking monument that confronted the Danish colonial amnesia while commemorating the legacies of resistance of the African people who were brought to the former Danish West Indies. The project was featured in over 100 media outlets around the world including the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, the BBC and Le Monde. Belle holds a MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba and a MA and BA from Columbia University in NY. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Research Center for Women at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.
Elizabeth Castelli is Professor of Religion and Interim Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women at Barnard College.
Sebastián Castro Niculescu is a former intern turned collective member with the NYC Trans Oral History Project. She is a trans Latina writer, artist, organizer/curator and performer originally from the NYC metropolitan area. Sebastián is currently a Mellon fellow studying Ethnic Studies at Brown University and Sculpture at RISD. Her research lies between Latinx Studies, Trans Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Performance Studies.
Yvette Christiansë is Professor of Africana Studies and English Literature at Barnard College. She is a scholar as well as an award winning poet, novelist, and librettist. She is the author of Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics (Fordham University Press 2013), poetry collections including Imprendehora (published in South Africa by Kwela Books/Snail Press 2009) and Castaway (Duke University Press, 1999), and award-winning novel Unconfessed (published Other Press, 2006; Kwela Books, 2007; Querido, 2007). Together with Syrian-born, Polish-citizen composer Zaid Jabri, she and co-librettist (and anthropologist, filmmaker) Rosalind Morris of Columbia University, have been working since 2012 to bring to life the English translation of Abdulrahmin Munif’s Cities of Salt (translated by Peter Theroux). On 22 July 2015, the Royal Opera House showcased three scenes and an intermezzo as part of the Shubbak Festival.
Maria Cotera holds a PhD from Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought, and an MA in English from the University of Texas. She is currently an associate professor in the Departments of Women’s Studies and American Culture at the University of Michigan, where she is the Director of Latina/o Studies Program. She is the author of numerous articles on women of color intellectual genealogies and has served on the National Council for the American Studies Association (2007-2010), the governing board of the Latina/o Studies Association (2014-2015) and the program committee for the National Women’s Studies Association (2017-2018). Cotera’s first book, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture (University of Texas Press, 2008), received the Gloria Anzaldúa book prize for 2009 from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Professor Cotera is currently working on Chicana por mi Raza, an online interactive archive of oral histories and material culture documenting Chicana Feminist praxis from 1965-1985. She is the lead curator for two exhibitions: Las Rebeldes: Stories of Strength and Struggle in southeast Michigan (2013) and Chicana Fotos: Nancy De Los Santos (2017).
Jarrett M. Drake is a liberatory memory worker from Gary, Indiana, where he graduated from Benjamin Banneker Achievement Center. Currently a PhD student in Social Anthropology at Harvard University as well as an advisory archivist for A People’s Archives of Police Violence in Cleveland, Jarrett pursues archival, anthropological, and educational projects that pertain to prison abolition, reparatory justice, and social movements. Prior to Harvard, Jarrett spent four years as the Digital Archivist at Princeton University. While there, he volunteered as an instructor in the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) Consortium through the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative, teaching preparatory and introductory college composition.
Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces and a 2018 National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree. Their autobiographical debut novel FRESHWATER was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and has been translated into six languages. Their first young adult novel, PET, will be published in 2019 by Knopf; their second adult novel, THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. Their writing has been published by T Magazine, Dazed, Buzzfeed, The Cut, and Granta Online, among others.
Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla is a border native from El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. Her research is on US Latino/a Literature with a focus on US-Mexico Border, Transnational and Intersectional Feminism, Hispanic Archives, Digital Humanities and Decolonial and Postcolonial Theory and Practice. Among her DH collaborations, she co-founded Borderlands Archives Cartography (BAC), is part of the core team of Torn Apart / Separados, and currently she is a member and the principal coordinator of a forthcoming community mapping, team-based initiative titled, United Fronteras. Currently, she works as a Teaching Assistant with the Spanish as a Heritage Language Program and participates in the making of a US Latino/a Digital Humanities Center with Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program.
Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, an archivist at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a PhD candidate trans/gender studies at Rutgers University. They are the recipient of the 2014 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association, a Radcliffe research grant from Harvard University and the 2014 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York, and the 2014 Martin Duberman Research Scholar Award from the New York Public Library. Most recently, they received a Palestinian American Research Committee grant and served as a 2017-2018 Queer Arts Mentor. They are working on a book project titled Blackness, the Beast and the Non Sovereign.
Jennifer Guglielmo is an associate professor of history at Smith College. Her publications include the award-winning Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (2010), and Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (2003). Currently she is co-directing a grant-funded project with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to develop a political education curriculum for their 50,000+ members that is rooted in history. In this capacity, she is developing tools (digital timelines, workshops, videos, etc.) for domestic workers and organizers to access historical knowledge and archival evidence, so it is easier to use history as an organizing tool.
Saidiya Hartman was born and raised in New York City. She is a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). She has published articles on slavery, the archive, and the city, including “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum,” “Venus in Two Acts,” and “The Belly of the World.” She has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University, and a Rockefeller Fellow at Brown University.
Michelle Joffroy is the director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Program, and Associate Professor of Spanish at Smith College, where she teaches courses on Zapatismo, indigenous feminisms, domestic work in the Americas, and environmental humanities. Her research centers Latin America and the U.S. Mexico borderlands and explores indigenous and borderland women’s cultural production at the intersection of eco/social movements, literature and film. She is currently co-directing a grant-funded collaboration with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, creating digital resources drawn from cultural production by and about domestic workers.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect and most recently Survived & Punished. Mariame is also a co-organizer of the Just Practice Collaborative, a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence. She is on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. She also runs the blog Prison Culture. Her work has been recognized with several honors and awards. Mariame is Researcher-in-Residence at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Center for Research on Women (2018-2020).
Steve Lang is a professor of sociology at LaGuardia Community College who focuses on urban and environmental issues. for the last 18 months he has been doing research on the history and politics of the New York City Public Housing Authority (NYCHA) with a focus on the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City.
Justin Leroy is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis, where he also co-directs the Mellon Research Initiative on Racial Capitalism. He is at work on a book titled Freedom’s Limit: Slave Emancipation and Racial Capitalism in the Long Nineteenth Century, which will be published in the History of U.S. Capitalism series at Columbia University Press.
Abram J. Lewis is a founder and coordinator of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, a community archive dedicated to preserving the stories of transgender New Yorkers, and to expanding trans community direction over the production of trans archives and history broadly. Lewis is also a postdoctoral fellow in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality studies at Grinnell College and holds a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota. Lewis’s writing has appeared in Radical History Review, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Scholar & Feminist Online and the anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017). He’s also working on two book projects: one about 1970s queer and feminist activism, and a history of trans activism prior to the 1990s transgender movement.
Grace Lile is Director of Operations and resident archivist at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Prior to CCR, Grace spent 15 years at WITNESS, where she founded the WITNESS Media Archive, the repository for 6000+ hours of video documentation from hundreds of human rights groups and activists worldwide. Grace co-authored the Activist’s Guide to Archiving Video, an online resource to support digital video archiving in social justice movements. Grace is active in the Palestine solidarity movement, and chairs the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Marya Annette McQuirter is the Digital Archives and Metadata Library Specialist Fellow at the Barnard Archives and Special Collections. She is pursuing an MA in Archival Management and has a PhD in History. She is also curator of the dc1968 project, an ambitious DH archive amplifying art, activism and architecture in Washington, DC in 1968 through 365+ stories and photographs.
Laura McTighe, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College and the co-founder and associate director of Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans. As an interdisciplinary scholar of gender, race, religion, and social movements, she studies the often-hidden histories of struggle that fill our present, and asks how practitioners use religion to organize and transform our world. Her research and teaching take shape in and are sustained through twenty years of work in our nation’s movements to end AIDS and prisons. Building on her published work in Signs (2018) and Souls (2017), her first book project, Fire Dreams, is a collaborative ethnography of activist persistence undertaken in partnership with the Black feminist leaders of New Orleans’ Women With A Vision after their offices were firebombed and destroyed in a still-uninvestigated arson attack. Her next project, “Moral Medicine,” is a historical ethnography of gendered punishment, which traces the continuities between nineteenth-century carceral imaginaries and our current era of mass criminalization. McTighe’s research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life, and the Dartmouth College Venture Fund. She currently serves on the boards of Men & Women In Prison Ministries in Chicago and Reconstruction, Inc. in Philadelphia.
Melissa Morrone is a public librarian in Brooklyn and has been a member of Librarians and Archivists with Palestine since its inception. She also edited Informed Agitation: Library and Information Skills in Social Justice Movements and Beyond and Human Operators: A Critical Oral History on Technology in Libraries and Archives.
Premilla Nadasen is Professor of History at Barnard College, a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar, and president of the National Women’s Studies Association. She is the author of the award-winning Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Beacon 2015). Nadasen has been engaged with community and campus activism for many years, bridging academic and activist work by making her scholarly work accessible to people outside of the university. She has worked with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, and the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative.
Monique Tú Nguyen is a passionate change-maker on the leading edge of the women’s movement. She has been the Executive Director of the Matahari Women Workers Center since 2012. Matahari is a Greater Boston organization where women of color, immigrant women, and families come together as sisters, workers, and survivors to make improvements in ourselves and society and work towards justice and human rights. Our goal is to end gender-based violence and exploitation. Under her leadership, Matahari has become a vibrant, political community organization making strides in advancing the rights and protections for domestic workers, women, immigrants and their families. Monique also helped to found the Massachusetts Coalition for Domestic Workers that successfully spearheaded the passage of the Massachusetts Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2014.
Chinelo Okparanta is the author of Happiness, Like Water and Under the Udala Trees. She is the winner of two Lambda Literary Awards and an O. Henry Prize. Other honors include finalist selections for the International DUBLIN Literary Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award as well as the Etisalat Prize for Literature. She has been nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award in Fiction, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2017.
Shannon O’Neill is the Director of the Barnard Archives and Special Collections and this History Librarian. Before joining Barnard in 2012, she was an archivist and reference librarian at the Atlantic City Free Public Library and the Los Angeles Public Library.
Born and raised in the Philippines, Riya Ortiz was transplanted in New York City in 2000 and has taken roots in the Filipino community since then. She serves as the Lead Organizer and Case Manager in Damayan Migrant Workers Association. She handles cases of Filipino domestic and migrant workers with labor trafficking, fraud in labor contracting, domestic violence, and stolen wage cases, among others. She also organizes the trafficking survivors and helps develop them into social justice leaders, serves as the liaison for Damayan’s partner attorneys, leads Damayan’s anti-trafficking and modern day slavery campaign, and represents Damayan in Beyond Survival, the anti-trafficking campaign of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA).
Molly Rosner is Assistant Director of Education Programs at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, a New York City history archive at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark and her MA in Oral History from Columbia University. She has worked at the Museum of the City of New York, the Apollo Theater, the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Navy Yard BLDG92. Her writing has appeared in the L.A. Review of Books, Salon, Huffington Post, the Brooklyn Navy Yard Blog and Jeunesse. She runs the blog Brooklyn in Love and At War, based on her grandparents’ love letters during World War II.
Cameron Rowland’s work critiques legal and economic structures that enforce contemporary life. Rowland was born in Philadelphia and currently lives and works in Queens, New York. Cameron Rowland has had solo exhibitions at Établissement d’en Face, Brussels; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne; Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland; Artists Space, New York; and ESSEX STREET, New York. Rowland has participated in group exhibitions at the Secession, Vienna; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the São Paulo Biennial, Brazil. Rowland’s exhibition D37 is currently on view at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Diana Sierra Becerra is a historian, popular educator, and organizer. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Insurgent Butterflies: Gender and Revolution in El Salvador, documents the feminist praxis that working-class and peasant women developed within labor and armed movements during the late 20th century. As a postdoctoral fellow, she is developing the project Putting History in Domestic Workers’ Hands, a popular education initiative to empower and mobilize domestic workers on a massive scale. The project is a collaboration between Smith College academics and organizers from the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Sierra Becerra is also a member of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, an organization that builds the collective power of immigrants and workers.
Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is Assistant Professor and Head of Reference at the Graduate Center Library of the City University of New York. Her work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, multiple Library Juice Press publications including her recent book chapters, “Lesbian Librarianship for All: A Manifesto, and “Referencing Audre Lorde” in a recent collection titled, Reference Librarianship & Justice: History, Practice & Praxis published by Library Juice Press in 2018, and others. She is Board chair for the Center for LGBTQ Studies/CLAGS where she also chairs the Archives Committee, and is on the advisory board for Gale Primary Resources’ Sexuality and Gender database. She speaks internationally on Black Lesbian archival narrative sourcing the work from collections of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, where she is a volunteer Coordinator and has recently co-curated the Salsa Soul Sisters Archival Collection exhibition with the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Gallery. Shawn received her MLS with an archival certification, and her MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in Fiction from Queens College, CUNY. She enjoys storytelling, narrative, and zine-making. To learn more about Shawn visit: cuny.is/shawntasmith
C. Riley Snorton, Professor in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, is a cultural theorist who analyzes representations of race, gender, and sexuality. He is the author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (U of Minn Press, 2017), winner of Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, the CLAGS’ Sylvia Rivera Award for Transgender Studies, the John Bowell Prize from the American Historical Association, and the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Languages Association. He is also the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (also with U of Minn Press, 2014), and co-editor of several special issues of journals such as Transgender Studies Quarterly, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, and the International Journal of Communication.
Martha Tenney is the Associate Director of the Barnard Archives and Special Collections and the American Studies Librarian at Barnard College.
Accessibility information
The venue is accessible to people with mobility and hearing disabilities. ASL interpretation will be available provided by All Hand in Motion. Please contact BCRW for additional access needs.
Books
Please visit the book tables in the Diana Center to browse and buy books by our speakers. Your purchases will support Word Up! Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria, a volunteer-run community bookshop in Washington Heights.
Thank you to our co-sponsors
Barnard College
Digital Humanities Center
Library and Archives
Office of Student Life
Office of the Provost
Africana Studies Department
American Studies Department
English Department
First-Year Writing
Psychology Department
Religion Department
Urban Studies Program
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department
Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies
Columbia University
Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life
Institute for Research in African-American Studies
Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Center for the Study of Social Difference
MFA Writing Program
Religion Department
NYU
Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
And
Apogee Journal