Events
Engaging our communities
Free Them All: A Mass Commutations Convening
Andrea Bible, Victoria Law, Andrea James, Valerie Seeley & Julia Shaw
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.
Read MoreUndoing the Future: Troubling Time/s, and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable
Karen Barad
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.
Read More1968 and Its Afterlives: Reflecting on Campus Activism Past, Present and Future
Elizabeth Langer '68, Nancy Biberman (SDS) '69, Karla Spurlock-Evans (SAS) '71, DaMonique Ballou '17, and Krish Bhatt '18
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.
Read MoreFrom Black Lives Matter to the White Power Presidency: Race and Class in the Trump Era
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
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.
Read MoreS&F Conference: Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence
Simone Browne, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Inderpal Grewal, Mariame Kaba, Cara Page, Nandita Sharma, and Dean Spade
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.
Read MoreA Centennial Celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks
Jericho Brown, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Erica Hunt, Darryl Pinckney, and others
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 […]
Read MoreCombahee River Collective Mixtape: Black Feminist Sonic Dissent Then and Now
Daphne Brooks, Kara Keeling, and Jacqueline Stewart
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 […]
Read MoreInvisible No More: Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color in Troubled Times
Barbara Smith, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Tourmaline, Mariame Kaba & others
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.
Read MoreThe Institutional as Usual: Diversity Work as Data Collection
Sara Ahmed
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 […]
Read MoreHomes for All, Cages for None: Housing Justice in an Age of Abolition
Christina Heatherton and Craig Willse
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 […]
Read More‘Song in a Weary Throat’: Pauli Murray’s Life and Legacy
Rosalind Rosenberg, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sangodare (Julia Roxanne Wallace) & Monica L. Miller
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 […]
Read MoreListening to Images: A Salon in Honor of Tina Campt
Tina Campt, Nicole Fleetwood, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman, and Deborah Thomas
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 […]
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