Upcoming and Recent Events
The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life
Join us for an exciting book salon in celebration of Barnard Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies Marisa Solomon’s The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life with J.T. Roane (Geography, Rutgers) and Mon M. (Survived & Punished), moderated by C. Riley Snorton (English & Comparative Literature and ISSG, Columbia).
Read MoreThe Scholar and Feminist: Fifty Years of Meeting the Moment
For half of a century, The Scholar and Feminist Conference has provided a mutually activating space for scholars, activists, and artists to confront the most pressing issues at any given moment. Defining scholarship as for activism from the very beginning, the conference has with unflagging regularity “met the moment” with intersectional feminist knowledge and action to inspire and build a robust response to contemporary crises. In many ways, the conference has grown up alongside academic feminism itself, yet, rather than uncritically mirror this history, it has consistently pushed back against feminism’s institutionalization. The conference highlights provocations, controversies, foundational gaps, and struggles that both cement its field-forming position and trouble a feminist progress narrative.
Read More‘Wayward’ Mythography: Zora Neale Hurston and Ancient Greece
Join us for the Natalie Boymel Kampen Memorial Lecture with Justine McConnell, McMillan-Stewart Fellow at Harvard University and Reader in Comparative Literature and Classical Reception at King’s College London. McConnell's lecture, “‘Wayward’ Mythography: Zora Neale Hurston and Ancient Greece,” will be followed by a conversation co-moderated by Monica Miller (Africana Studies, Barnard) and Rosa Andújar (Classics, Barnard). The event will conclude with a Q&A with audience members.
Read MoreOff the Spectrum: The Lost Girls of Autism
For decades, autism research has focused overwhelmingly on boys and men, and some autism researchers even see autism itself as “masculine.” Drawing on her own decades of research with autistic women and girls, Neuroscientist Gina Rippon upends this view. Beyond highlighting autism’s manifestations in women and girls, Rippon’s research illuminates the entangled matter of gender/sex, autism, and neuroscience, and exposes the devastating effects of systemic gender bias in autism research and services.
Read MoreWe Will Not Be Erased: Queer Archives, Trans Histories
For over forty years, cultural historian Steven Watson has documented the stories and artwork at the leading edge of artistic and cultural movements, including the movement for queer and trans liberation. Working in collaboration with filmmaker William Markarian-Martin, Steven recently launched Artifacts, making his collection of rare, firsthand accounts from pioneers such as Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Holly Woodlawn, and many others accessible to students, researchers, and anyone interested in connecting to queer and trans history. Watson’s archival collection foregrounds the importance of engaging with and animating trans and queer histories in order to combat the present-day erasure of trans lives.
Read MoreWhy AI Needs Feminism: From Campus Surveillance to Global Conflicts
Why AI Needs Feminism brings together feminist critical technologists Lauren Klein (Emory University) and Meredith Broussard (NYU) with Barnard’s Saima Akhtar (Vagelos Computational Science Center) and Gabrielle Gutierrez (Neuroscience) to examine how algorithmic surveillance is reshaping everyday life—from predictive policing in New York neighborhoods of color to the data infrastructures sustaining global conflicts and occupations. This conversation challenges the myth of “data-driven decision-making” as neutral progress and asks how feminist approaches grounded in care and accountability can offer paths toward refusal and repair.
Read MoreRecent Writing
A Conversation with Marisa Solomon on The Elsewhere is Black
Barnard Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Marisa Solomon’s new book, The Elsewhere Is Black, examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns […]
Read MoreFreedom Dreaming and Worldmaking: Tourmaline and Hope Dector on Marsha P. Johnson’s Inspiring Life
Award-winning artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist Tourmaline has spent over two decades lovingly researching and preserving Marsha P. Johnson’s life. In two books published this past spring—MARSHA: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, the first comprehensive biography of Johnson, and a children’s book, One Day in June—Tourmaline provides a richly textured story of […]
Read More“Brown Sugar Makes the World Go ‘Round”: A Conversation with Kim F. Hall on The Sweet Taste of Empire
Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim F. Hall’s new book, The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (The University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2025), centers the complicated history of sugar in order to ask what lies beyond its narrative of pleasure. Hall explores how the unique […]
Read MoreS&F Online
Abolition Feminism and the Politics of Reproduction
Guest editors Sarah Haley and Emily Thuma gather contributions that examine how gendered, racialized, and classed forms of life are both sustained and constrained by carceral systems, and how abolitionist praxis reimagines and rebuilds the reproduction of the social otherwise. Abolition feminism here operates as analytic and an ethic: a refusal of state violence with a commitment to building alternative infrastructures of care, safety, and survival.
Read MoreRage, Struggle, Freedom
Contributions by Nagihan Akarsel (Jineolojî Academy), Electra B., Azza Basarudin, Loren Cahill. Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草, Livia de Souza Vidal, J. D. Harlock, The International Women's Network Against Militarism (IWNAM), Iida Käyhkö, Bramsh Khan, Youree Kim, Arianne Napier-White, Şervîn Nûdem (Jineolojî Academy), Ximena Keogh Serrano, Loan Tran, Fadwa Tuqan, Helena Wacko, and the YVE Collective.
Read MoreProjects
Transnational Black Feminisms
Transnational Black Feminisms was initiated by Premilla Nadasen and Celia Naylor as a working group at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) in 2019. In 2023, Tami Navarro joined Premilla as project co-director, Anna Reumert joined as project assistant, and the working group partnered with BCRW. The podcast and the conference are supported by CSSD and BCRW. […]
Read MoreCare, Racial Capitalism, and Social Reproduction
This project, led by Premilla Nadasen (BCRW C0-Director and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History), brings together scholars, organizers, and artists to consider the intersections of social reproduction, racial capitalism, care, the state, and liberatory social change.
Read MoreOur Work
BCRW has for decades worked to respond to violence at all scales — interpersonal and international — and to contribute long histories of global feminist efforts to build a world of justice, peace, and freedom. Some of our work on behalf of these values of social justice feminism includes: Responding to Violence, Rethinking Human Secularity with […]
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