Meet our Research Assistants
Student Research Assistants are an integral part of BCRW’s community, providing crucial support to its social justice programming and events. In the 2021-22 academic year, six students worked with BCRW staff and collaborators on a range of projects. These projects include processing the new collection of archives from the Coalition of Women Prisoners, working with activist Cara Page on the Healing Histories Project, assisting the Housing Working Group, creating a categorization system for archived Scholar & Feminist articles, and captioning BCRW’s online video for increased accessibility.
Nilu Cooper ’23: This semester I have been working on the Healing Histories Project, a timeline of the history and evolution of the medical industrial complex. More specifically, my research pertains to the Covid-19 timeline, which tracks the global emergence of the virus as well as responses and resistance to the management of the pandemic within the United States. I’ve worked primarily with Susan Raffo and Cara Page, co-founders of the Healing Histories Project, to investigate the ways in which white supremacy, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism, economic injustice and conditional access to care continue to shape the state’s responses to Covid-19. As a History and Gender Studies major, it has been extremely meaningful to orient my research toward these systems of oppression, and pursue stories and reporting that center those who have been most impacted by the pandemic. I’ve gained a deeper understanding of the gaps in mainstream coverage of the virus, and the necessity of actively seeking out voices from marginalized communities in order to grasp the ongoing, disproportionate toll of this pandemic.
Eve Glazier ’23: For the past two semesters, I have been working in the Barnard Archives to process the collections of the New York Coalition for Women Prisoners, an organization formed in 1994 to organize against the distinct challenges faced by women entangled in the prison industrial complex. The CWP sunsetted their organization in 2021 and has generously donated their records to the Barnard Archives and Special Collections. I have been preparing the collection for folks like community organizers, students, and researchers to come and learn from the CWP’s collective history. My work with this collection has generated important questions about the ways archives can function both as a carceral space that reinforces institutions of power rooted in colonialism, anti-Blackness, and capitalism; and also potentially as a liberatory site for dismantling the hegemony of these systems, reclaiming narrative power, and practicing new ways of relating with the past. Working on this project while taking Professor Sarah Haley’s class on Abolitionist Feminism has been incredibly generative in situating the CWP within a genealogy of anti-carceral feminist organizing and grappling with the possibility (or impossibility?) of an abolitionist archive. As someone committed to abolitionist organizing, I am deeply grateful for the wisdom I’ve gathered from engaging with the CWP’s work and the narratives of its members—I am so excited for everyone to see the collection soon!
Anne Janowski ’23: My research has specifically pertained to collecting data on major historical events that have shaped the legacy of public housing and its continual disinvestment within cities such as New York. I had the opportunity to meet with Pam Phillips and learn from Changing the Narrative: A Public Housing Project. I’ve sought to investigate the intersection between the disinvestment in public housing projects and the continual oppression of marginalized communities by the powerful, wealthy State apparatus. With my interest in housing justice as a history major and collaborator on Undesign the Redline @ Barnard, this work has been especially impactful to me, raising important questions of how we can envision a society in which quality housing is affordable and accessible and safe for all of its tenants.
Kelsey Kitzke ’23: This academic year I’ve been focused on developing and implementing a tagging system for past issues of The Scholar and Feminist Online for its upcoming website. My time has been spent reviewing all S&F issues and articles published over the past twenty years, summarizing common themes and topics across issues, and researching and discussing feminist terminology. I have loved spending time with so much amazing writing, seeing how the journal has grown over the course of its twenty years, and preparing it for an even more expansive future as a home for feminist scholarship. With my interest in editing and publishing, I’ve loved being involved in the production of accessible digital scholarship. As an anthropology major and creative writer, I’ve especially loved reading the journal’s multiple issues about Zora Neale Hurtson (BC ’28). Going forward, I hope to be further involved in the journal’s ongoing production. I’m excited to see what more is to come for S&F Online!
Miska Lewis ’24: This semester, I’ve been working with Hope Dector and more recently Miriam Neptune to caption previous BCRW event recordings. I love video making and editing and do both constantly, so getting do work with BCRW on a similar project is wonderful. It’s been extremely inspiring to watch so many incredible speakers and presentations. In particular, I have been really touched by the events that have happened in remembrance of great poets, writers, or professors, such as Quandra Prettyman and June Jordan. This also has given me a peek into their writing that I might not otherwise have gotten. In the future, I hope to do more work on video production with BCRW, and maybe even film some things myself. I am an Anthropology major with a love for storytelling, and this project and my work at BCRW more generally has been right up my alley. I’m so grateful to be part of the community and get to work with such inspiring, driven people.
Banner image: Students at faculty at the BCRW Office, including student RAs Janey Kritzman and Leslie Calman. Source: Barnard Archives and Special Collections.