Why 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.
A Conversation with the Editors: Abolition Feminism and the Politics of Reproduction
Join guest editors Sarah Haley and Emily Thuma, S&F Online Senior Editor Sandra Moyano-Ariza, and S&F Online Executive Editor Rebecca Jordan-Young to mark the release of the Fall 2025 issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, “Abolition Feminism and the Politics of Reproduction.” This conversation will focus on the issue’s development and key questions and […]
The City and the University: A Symposium
Student-led symposium exploring universities’ roles in society, examining social inequality, segregation, and education through critical research, archives, and activism, connecting campus histories with broader political structures.
Off 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.
‘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.
The City and the University: A Symposium
REGISTER The University in/and Crisis Working Group invites you to attend a symposium featuring research and activism by students at Barnard College, Teachers College, and Columbia University. Students will present work that adopts methods drawn from the field of “critical university studies,” and that draws on archives and repositories held on campus and across the […]
Who Gets to Travel? Race and the Politics of Student Travel in an Era of Global Crisis
REGISTER 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 […]
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 Mohapatra (Community Justice Exchange), moderated by C. Riley Snorton (English & Comparative Literature and ISSG, Columbia).
Saul Williams on Black Experimentation, Fugitive Pedagogies, and the Art of Resistance
Poet, musician, filmmaker, actor and intellectual Saul Williams discusses the relationships between aesthetic forms and political education in conversation with Dr. Shana Redmond, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference. Reflecting on practices of Black experimentation—in language, music, and film—this dialogue explores the various sites of enclosure and foreclosure, from the nation state to the university, that bear upon the present and what practices are necessary to enact more just futures.
The 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.
Freedom and Insurgence: Recalling Fanon
Organized on the occasion of the centennial of the decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon, Freedom and Insurgence brings together Dylan Rodríguez and Ezekiel Dixon-Román for a conversation about capacious and generative approaches to mass intellectuality. The speakers approach the global legacies of Fanon’s thought on ‘archives of the possible,’ which illuminate approaches to the problem of democratic education and the crisis of the university in our times.
Milisuthando: Intimacy, Race, and Belonging in Apartheid South Africa
MILISUTHANDO is a deeply intimate portrait of filmmaker, writer and poet Milisuthando Bongela’s youth in South Africa. The self-titled documentary explores love, friendship and belonging in a South Africa stratified by racism, proving that only if we understand its tentacles, can we begin to extricate ourselves from its clutches.
The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery, and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean
Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim 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.
We 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.
Black Feminist Ethnographies in Latin America and the Caribbean
Join us for an engaging joint-book discussion with Professors Darlène Dubuisson (University of California – Berkeley) and Prisca Gayles (University of Nevada – Reno) as they explore the intersecting themes of their recent books, Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures and Pain into Purpose.
MARSHA: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson
For the Helen Pond McIntyre ‘48 Lecture, Tourmaline will join C. Riley Snorton for a discussion of her new biography of Marsha P. Johnson. They will explore finding creative guidance in the archive, the power of Johnson’s life as a blueprint for living today, and the continued struggle for queer and trans liberation.
You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take
Drawing from personal experience, history, religion, political strategy, and more, Theoharis and Sandweiss-Back argue that American poverty will through a mass movement open to all and led by the poor.
Love in a F*cked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together
Around the globe people are faced with spiraling crises from the pandemic and ecological crisis to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, genocide, racist policing, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. More and more of us feel mobilized to fight back. But even those of us who long for change seem to have trouble […]
Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism
Banu Subramanian, Rebecca Jordan-Young, and Natali Valdez will discuss how botany’s foundational theories and practices were shaped and fortified in the aid of colonial rule and its extractive ambitions.
Missionary Women and the Imperial Roots of White Evangelical Feminism
Exploring the origins of a new world order in Christian imperial feminism.
Rage, Struggle, Freedom: Unveiling Feminist Perspectives on Global Crises
Launching the Scholar and Feminist issue 20.1 with guest editors Margo Okazawa-Rey and Elif Sarican and contributors Gwyn Kirk and Şervîn Nûdem, moderated by Premilla Nadasen.
The Way You Make Me Funny
How can humor be feminist? How can humor help us tell the hard truths?
Architecture of Migration
Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking history or architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrations in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, 2024), a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes–even if born out of emergency–reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian […]
Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Premilla Nadasen (Barnard College) will be joined by Dorothy Roberts (University of Pennsylvania) to discuss her new book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023), a powerful critique of capitalist care relations and the economic profit extracted from care.
With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism
Live transcription is available here. Jewish anarchism has long been marginalized in histories of anarchist thought and action. in With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (AK Press, 2023), co-editors Anna Elena Torres (University of Chicago) and Kenyon Zimmer (University of Texas, Arlington) will be joined by contributor Samuel Brody (University of Kansas) to […]
Transforming Education for Sustainability
Co-editors and contributors will discuss their book investigating how educators and researchers in the sciences, social sciences, and the arts, connect concepts of sustainability to work in their fields of study and in the classrooms where they teach the next generation.
Care, Racial Capitalism, and Social Reproduction
This conference will bring together scholars, organizers, and artists to think together about the intersections of social reproduction, racial capitalism, care, the state, and liberatory social change. The conference will draw on the long history of organizing, study, thinking, and praxis forged by feminist activists, organizers, scholars, and artists who have expanded our political analysis […]
On Feminism and Palestine
A Faculty Roundtable Discussion Presenters Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University, Anthropology and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender) Jafari Sinclaire Allen (Columbia University, African American and African Diaspora Studies) Jack Halberstam (Columbia University, English & Comparative Literature and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender) Premilla Nadasen (Barnard College, History and BCRW) Neferti Tadiar (Barnard College, […]
Marriage and Divorce in Colonial and Contemporary Philippines
Presented by the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College Issues of marriage and divorce remain contentious in the Philippines, but the history of marriage remains unexplored. When the Spanish established colonial rule and Catholicism in the 16th century, they also introduced new laws regulating marriage in the Philippines, and by the 19th […]
Caste, Gender, Diaspora
The transnational resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement has incited communities across the globe to raise their voices against discrimination and inequality and to work across demographics and colonial histories to reflect more broadly on shared affinities and political solidarities. The resonances between caste and race have been an especially important site for rethinking […]