{"id":8725,"date":"2025-08-29T15:58:50","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T19:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/?page_id=8725"},"modified":"2026-06-04T19:01:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T23:01:44","slug":"the-university-and-crisis-working-group","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/projects\/the-university-and-crisis-working-group\/","title":{"rendered":"The University in\/and Crisis Working Group"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

About<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD)<\/a> at Columbia University, the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW)<\/a>, and the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study (Gordon Institute)<\/a> at Teachers College are partnering on an interdisciplinary, faculty-led research working group on the university and crisis. Conceived in response to recent developments at Columbia University and Barnard College and in line with CSSD\u2019s new thematic focus on crisis<\/a>, the working group is engaged in a year-long series of reading meetings and public programs to explore the state of the university today and how we got here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Rather than approaching the current crisis moment as an aberration, the group aims to contextualize it within longer histories of the university and its entanglement with wider socioeconomic and political structures. Focused on four conceptual figures and sites, \u201cthe archive,\u201d \u201cthe experiment,\u201d \u201cthe student,\u201d and \u201cthe lexicon,\u201d the group engages with critical university studies scholarship to think through universities\u2019 entanglements with formations such as colonialism, slavery, and their afterlives; the role of the university in reproducing socio-economic inequalities; the precaritization of academic labor and its impact on academic freedom; the securitization of campuses; financialization, performance metrics, and branding for the neoliberal university; affirmative action, diversity, and the tokenization of difference\/administrative co-opting of ethnic and gender studies; and universities as real estate developers with massive displacement effects.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Co-directors<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Anupama Rao<\/strong> is Professor of History at Barnard, Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia, and was Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East<\/em> (2012-2019). Rao is completing the monograph Ambedkar in America<\/em> and the volume The Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar<\/em>. She has edited Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R. B. More<\/em> (2019) and the reader Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality<\/em> (2018), a sequel to the well-known volume, Gender and Caste<\/em> (2006). Rao is the author of The Caste Question<\/em> (2009), which received critical acclaim for transforming understandings of the relationship between caste and democracy. She directs the Ambedkar Initiative, which approaches B. R. Ambedkar as among the twentieth century\u2019s most important democratic thinkers, and resuscitates links between democracies through institutional and disciplinary histories of Ambedkar\u2019s alma mater, Columbia University, in engaged pedagogy and public outreach.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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C. Riley Snorton<\/strong> is professor of English and Comparative Literature and jointly appointed with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University. He is the author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity<\/em> (2017) and Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low<\/em> (2010). Snorton is also the co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value<\/em> (2020) and The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers<\/em> (2024).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About The Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia University, the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study (Gordon Institute) at Teachers College are partnering on an interdisciplinary, faculty-led research working group on the university and crisis. Conceived in response to recent developments […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8726,"parent":3672,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1437],"class_list":["post-8725","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-projects"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8725"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11915,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8725\/revisions\/11915"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}