Building Accountable Communities
Accountability is a familiar buzz-word in contemporary social movements, but what does it mean? How do we work toward it? What does it look like to be accountable to survivors without exiling or disposing of those who do harm?
Building from the Left: Strategies to Disrupt the Right
How can the left develop more robust strategies to undermine and disrupt the powerful ascendance of the U.S. Right, and build a transformative intersectional social justice agenda?
Roxane Gay in Conversation with Katia D. Ulysse
These authors will discuss issues including the Caribbean and its diaspora, method, feminism, and gender in their work. The conversation with be followed by a moderated discussion.
End of Year Celebration
A celebration of BCRW’s work, appreciation for our incredible Director Tina Campt, and welcoming incoming Interim Director Elizabeth Castelli.
Free Them All: A Mass Commutations Convening
The Survived and Punished NYC Mass Commutation Organizing Campaign is working to pressure NY State to commute the sentences of survivors of intimate partner violence and other racialized, gender-based violence who are in prison throughout the state.
The Second Bi-Annual Black Lesbian Conference: Work as Memoir
This will be the second bi-annual gathering for Black/African Descent Lesbians* and supporters to responsibly consider and engage important issues that can strengthen and support our individual and collective community work.
From Black Lives Matter to the White Power Presidency: Race and Class in the Trump Era
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016), an examination of the history and politics of Black America and the development of the social movement Black Lives Matter in response to police violence in the United States. Taylor’s current research examines race and public policy including American housing policies.
Emma Goldman’s Struggles for Utopia: Feminism and Ambivalence
Clare Hemmings will explore 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman conflicting views on gender, sexuality, race, and the means to bring about a political revolution. Hemmings shows that these are not contradictions but offerings for means of thinking through current dilemmas and power relations, and living through uncertainties.
Critical Caribbean Feminisms: Erna Brodber and Nicole Dennis-Benn
Join us for a reading and conversation between authors Erna Brodber (Nothing’s Mat and The Rainmaker’s Mistake, among others) and Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun) in the expanded series Critical Caribbean Feminisms.
Undoing the Future: Troubling Time/s, and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable
Karen Barad will consider the ways in which quantum physics troubles modernist conceptions of time, and asks whether quantum temporalities might offer radical political imaginaries for cohabiting this planet more justly.
1968 and Its Afterlives: Reflecting on Campus Activism Past, Present and Future
In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the historic 1968 protests at Barnard and Columbia, BCRW will host a conversation reflecting on the role of Barnard students in these transformative events and the history of campus activism that converged in 1968 and continue into the present.
S&F Conference: Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence
This year’s Scholar and Feminist Conference will bring together a broad community of thinkers and organizers to grapple with the ever-deepening penetration of surveillance practices into everyday life, and ways to engage in self-defense against the militarized, racist police state’s demands for constant access in the name of “security” and public order.
A Centennial Celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks was a major American poet of the twentieth century, and a writer of great formal mastery and intimate observation. The author of twenty separate volumes of poetry, including the celebrated A Street in Bronzeville (1945), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Allen (1949), and In the Mecca (1968), as well as the experimental novel Maude […]
Combahee River Collective Mixtape: Black Feminist Sonic Dissent Then and Now
Join BCRW in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement, the radical Black feminist manifesto completed in 1977 that laid out key tenets of intersectional theory and social justice reform. Taking the works of wide range of artists as our point of departure—from musicians such as the Knowles Sisters and Nina Simone […]
Invisible No More: Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color in Troubled Times
This conference is the first in a series of events taking place in the midwest, south, and west coast to explore and support ongoing resistance to police violence against Black women and women of color.
The Institutional as Usual: Diversity Work as Data Collection
In the annual Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture, Sara Ahmed explores how institutions are built from small acts of use. The institutional becomes usual. What usually happens seems to keep happening without having to be made into official policy and sometimes even despite an official policy. We learn about the institutional (as usual) from those who […]
Homes for All, Cages for None: Housing Justice in an Age of Abolition
In 2016, the Barnard Center for Research on Women assembled a Poverty Working Group to examine the state’s neglect and abandonment of poor people, people of color, and people with disabilities. The group asks how can we deepen our understanding of and resistance to the ways that the neoliberal state and racialized, classed, gendered, and […]
‘Song in a Weary Throat’: Pauli Murray’s Life and Legacy
Until recently Pauli Murray was an unsung figure in the Civil Rights and feminist movements. A poet, writer, activist, labor organizer, legal theorist, and Episcopal priest, Murray took on the key social and economic justice issues of her day. The subject of a new biography, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray, by emerita professor […]
Listening to Images: A Salon in Honor of Tina Campt
What happens when we shift our way of engaging with photography? When we go beyond looking at images and, instead, listen to them? Tina Campt, director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, delves into lost archives of historically dismissed photographs to deepen our understanding of the lives of black subjects throughout the black […]
Hearing the Hidden Stories: Walking as a Signature and Interpretation
Our public spaces are repositories of stories, many of which reveal both the nature of public life and the particularities of the lives that move through them. But in our attempt to understand public life, we tend to immerse ourselves in data, too often sidelining the rich variety of stories that helps us understand what […]
What is the Future of Black Lives Under a Kleptocracy?
DESCRIPTION On Tuesday, April 11, BCRW is thrilled to host “What is the Future of Black Lives Under a Kleptocracy?” a lecture by Alicia Garza focusing on the first 100 days of the new administration and what’s at stake for the movement.. [su_button url=”https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-alicia-garza-tickets-32364282440″ background=”#ed6f1e” center=”yes”]RSVP to Attend[/su_button] SPEAKER BIO Alicia Garza is an Oakland-based […]
Poetics of Justice: A Conversation Between Claudia Rankine and Dionne Brand
BCRW is thrilled to host Poetics of Justice: A Conversation Between Claudia Rankine and Dionne Brand, moderated by BCRW Associate Director Tami Navarro, on the power and necessity of poetry in resisting the contemporary manifestations of racism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy. This event is very much a response to the current political moment in the […]
Accountable Bystander/Upstander Training
Bystander intervention and de-escalation involve a series of tools that can be consciously employed to defuse volatile situations. In this interactive workshop, bystander intervention and de-escalation will be presented in the context of self-defense and harm reduction. Students will identify verbal and non-verbal techniques and tactics to de-escalate conflict. Students will also learn the four […]
Erotic As Power: Audre Lorde Project 20th Anniversary Celebration
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor […]
A Black Feminist Reading of the Movement for Black Lives: Resistance and the U.S. Left Reimagined
Award-winning historian, writer, and longtime activist Barbara Ransby joins BCRW to give the 2017 Natalie Boymel Kampen Memorial Lecture in Feminist Criticism and History, “A Black Feminist Reading of the Movement for Black Lives: Resistance and the U.S. Left Reimagined.” Ransby is Distinguished Professor of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History […]
We Move Together: Disability Justice and Trans Liberation
>Watch the Livestream here. How are organizers and artists building cross-movement solidarity from an understanding that no one is disposable? How can we reclaim bodily autonomy, our right to exist in public space, and our liberatory visions of a world where all bodyminds are valued? As disabled and/or trans people whose bodies are pathologized and […]
Our Voices: Trans Stories, Trans Justice, Trans Resiliency
Featuring: I Am (HEAR), Islan (Won’t You Celebrate), and Interview with Juan Evans (excerpt) by Sasha Alexander and Olympia Perez, Black Trans Media Over Stigmatized, a short film by Giselle Bleuz and Devin Lowe with Luce Lincoln, Global Action Project From the Ground to the Sky (excerpts) by Marin Watts, Trans Justice Funding Project In a time […]
The Real Sister Act: Black Catholic Nuns and the Long Struggle to Desegregate U.S. Religious Life
The Religion Department at Barnard College is thrilled to host a lecture with Shannen Dee Williams, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, on the epic journey of Black Catholic sisters in the United States from their fiercely contested beginnings in the 19th century to the present day. In this lecture, Williams will […]
Harmattan Winds, Disease and Gender Gaps in Human Capital Investment
Research on gender-based educational disparities in the Global South has focused on differential investment in the education of boys versus girls, higher costs and lower educational attainment among girls, and factors leading to these realities. In this lunchtime lecture, Belinda Archibong will extend this conversation to share her research on ways that public health and […]
Haptic Bodies: Perception, Touch, and the Ethics of Being
DESCRIPTION PROGRAM PARTICIPANT BIOS DESCRIPTION hap·tic ˈhaptik/ adjective technical of or relating to the sense of touch, in particular relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using the senses of touch and proprioception [relative perception]. How are we, as global citizens, accountable to each other? This year’s Scholar and Feminist Conference explores the haptic—the […]