Oral histories, collaborations, and what we're reading

Barnard Center for Research on Women

News from the Center

Celebrating 50 Years: Oral History and Archives

This summer, BCRW Post-Baccalaureate Fellow Eve Marie Kausch ’18 participated in the 2019 Summer Oral History Institute organized by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research and the Columbia Journalism School. This year’s program was called “From the Margins to the Center: Narrating the Politics of Our Times.”

During the two-week intensive, Eve and other fellows considered how oral historians might think fifty years ahead when assessing what to include or omit in their stories; how to frame stories to ensure that they will have staying power in the future; how to cultivate curiosity about the stories at the margins; and how to trust our instincts when we sense that some things–such as stories we may inherit from family, community, or dominant narratives–don’t add up?

These questions will guide Eve through their research in the BCRW archives as they craft an oral history project surrounding BCRW’s fifty year history.

 

Poverty and Housing Working Group: Changing the Narrative

In 2016, BCRW launched the Poverty and Housing Working Group and, within it, the resident-centered, place-based community engagement project, Changing the Narrative (CTN). This project is organized by BCRW Senior Program Assistant Pamela Phillips and made up of BCRW staff, faculty, students, and community members. The project seeks to make resident’s histories and experiences the focal point of the public housing narrative. CTN aims to create spaces within public housing developments for residents to discuss their individual and collective experiences, shed the stigma attached to public housing (borne mostly from outside reporting), and build collective power.

This summer, Pamela partnered with Sydnie L. Mosley Dances and Lincoln Center Education to develop site-specific dances choreographed by Sydnie L. Mosley ’07, former BCRW Alumna Fellow and artist-in-residence at Lincoln Center Education, based on the oral histories collected by the working group over the last two years.

Since the working group’s initial oral history sessions at NYCHA’s Marble Hill Houses in 2017, oral history collection remains ongoing. Pamela is currently developing future workshops and oral history sessions for residents and organizers in partnership with residents at Amsterdam Houses and Manhattanville Houses.

 

Engaging Caribbean Development students 3

Transnational Feminisms: Engaging Caribbean Development

This summer, Tami Navarro traveled to Barbados to teach a course titled “Engaging Caribbean Development” in the Caribbean Institute in Gender and Development.

In this course, students were invited to explore the relationships between gender and labor over time, paying particular attention to how labor itself is gendered and informed by race and class. The course focused on the Caribbean, Latin America, and other regions of the African Diaspora.

About Transnational Feminisms

The Transnational Feminisms Initiative was founded in 2010 by Catherine Sameh, former BCRW Associate Director, and currently Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality at UC-Irvine. The initiative seeks to continue BCRW’s longstanding practice of bridging scholarship and activism in ways that connect the work of Barnard faculty and students with feminist scholars and activists around the world by building deeply connected networks, organizations, and movements in the struggle toward justice.

Led by BCRW Associate Director Tami Navarro since 2014, Transnational Feminisms continues as a curricular initiative offering credit-bearing courses for students to engage in research and study in Cape Town with the African Gender Institute, and Barbados with the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.


BCRW meeting minutes 1987

Looking Ahead: Our 50th Anniversary Celebration

Next year, in 2020-2021, BCRW will be celebrating fifty years as a center for research, collaboration, and action. In the coming year, we will be spending time in the archives and with members of our community so we can share this history with you.

Above is a snippet of BCRW Advisory Board meeting minutes from 1987, when members discussed a name change for our fledgling institution.

At the top of the post is a clip from the Barnard Bulletin in 1982.  

Join us to build toward fifty more 

From the beginning, our work has been supported by generous contributions from our community. Join us today in celebrating the last fifty years, and supporting BCRW’s future.

Stay tuned for a full calendar of events in 2020-2021 to celebrate our 50th anniversary together.

Donate


What we are reading

What we’re reading this summer

Summer isn’t over yet! Here are some of our recommended summer reads.

The Overstory by Richard Powers
Recommended by Elizabeth Castelli 

The Overstory is an epic novel about trees, forests, the deep and abiding interspecies relationships they make possible, and the impending environmental apocalypse rooted in humans’ willful blindness, irrational faith in unimpeded economic growth and the myth of endless abundance. The novel follows the stories of a handful of people who stumble into lives of radicalism in defense of trees, and by the end, you want to turn yourself into an arboreal defense force stylite saint perched atop an old-growth redwood. – Elizabeth Castelli

Women Talking by Miriam Toews
Recommended by Elizabeth Castelli 
This spare novel has roots in a true story about a Mennonite community in Bolivia, where over 130 women and girls were drugged and raped by men and boys in the community over a period of several years (2005-2009); the assaults were, before two men were caught in the act, attributed to the actions of demons or ghosts. Nine men were eventually tried and convicted for the crimes. In Women Talking, Canadian Mennonite novelist Miriam Toews imagines a similar set of events, but with a twist: after the discovery of the crime and the arrest of the accused men, the community’s leadership gives the women of the community a choice: to forgive their assailants or to leave the community forever. The novel is an account of the meetings in which the women discuss how to respond to this ethical ultimatum. The narrative withholds and then discloses, bit by bit, as the full range of the horror of the story emerges. – Elizabeth Castelli

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai
Recommended by Elizabeth Castelli

A librarian on the lam with a child who has run away from his suffocating fundamentalist Christian family… road trip, with a twist. What’s not to love? – Elizabeth Castelli

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
Recommended by Elizabeth Castelli

This book brings together the history of The Troubles in Northern Ireland with a broader exploration of themes of martyrdom, confession, loyalty, resistance, revolutionary violence, and accountability–and includes the critical and controversial role of archives and oral histories in solving the case of the abduction, execution, and disappearance of Jean McConville, a mother of 10, whom the Provisional IRA suspected of passing secrets to the British army during the occupation of Northern Ireland.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Recommended by Eve Kausch

Middlesex tells the story of an intersex child, who narrates the book beginning with their grandparents’ incestuous relationship that leads to a genetic mutation that presents as “ambiguous” genitalia. I initially picked up this book because of its obvious themes of gender, but what I really enjoyed about it was its narrative picture of Detroit in the early to mid 20th century. While I have many thoughts about Jeffrey Eugenides’s ideas of gender and sex, I loved reading his presentation of the Detroit auto industry in the 1920s and 30s and the race riots of the 1960s. Even though I grew up not far from Detroit, my education on the actual impact of these historic events was very limited. Despite this book being famous for its intersex character, I think what I got most out of it was a snapshot of Detroit’s history from the perspective of one immigrant family. – Eve Kausch 

Beloved, Song of Solomon, Sula, and Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
Recommended by Avi Cummings

Read more about Song of Solomon.

Read more about Beloved.

Read more about Sula.

Read this essay about Tar Baby by Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage. 

Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro
Recommended by Avi Cummings

Read the Kirkus review here.

Read the title short story “Friend of My Youth” in The New Yorker. 

Saidiya Hartman book salon

Fall Programming Preview

Check out the full list of fall programming, including a reading and with celebrated author and activist Cherríe Moraga, a discussion with feminist neuroscientists, and a screening of the award-winning documentary “Decade of Fire.” Learn more here. http://www.tb-credit.ru/zaimy-na-kartu.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/get.html

Support BCRW's ongoing programming at the intersections of feminism and social justice.

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