Archive
war
“Support the Troops”: the Solider, the Citizen, and Our Ongoing Attachment to Militarism in post-9/11 America
Jan 17, 2024
Barnard Professor of Anthropology Nadia Abu El-Haj’s recently released book Combat Trauma elucidates the ways in which a rising focus on the psychological consequences of war on American combat personnel has dovetailed with ubiquitous calls to “support the troops” so as to undermine criticisms of US militarism in the post 9/11 era. Abu El-Haj tracks […]
Read More“they said in the name of self-defense”: Technologies of Surveillance and the Selling of the In/Security State
Featuring Rabab Abdulhadi, Dylan Rodríguez, Nandita Sharma, and Dean Spade, moderated by Craig Willse, at the 43rd Annual Scholar & Feminist Conference, "Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence."
Read MoreDid You Kiss the Dead Body? Visualizing Absence in the Archive of War
Rajkamal Kahlon
Rajkamal Kahlon, Artist-In-Residence at the American Civil Liberties Union, speaks about her ongoing project Did You Kiss the Dead Body? Kahlon works with U.S. military autopsy reports, death certificates and torture related government documents from Iraq and Afghanistan to explore the bureaucratization of death, as it intersects questions of empathy and the construction of memory. […]
Read MoreStudent Life During Wartime: World War II at Barnard College
Karen Seeley
Before the outbreak of World War II, Barnard’s Committee on Instruction met monthly to discuss practical academic concerns, and to debate the essential components of an undergraduate liberal arts education. But in the early 1940s the Committee’s conversations underwent a marked shift, as the Second World War increasingly intruded on the requirements and routines of […]
Read MoreSeeing Like a Peacebuilder: An Ethnography of International Intervention
Séverine Autesserre
Why do international interventions so often fail to secure a sustainable peace? Why do others succeed? To answer these questions, we need to analyze how various cultures influence non-military peacebuilders on the ground, how the various actors and functions of peace interventions interact, and how shared understandings can promote peace intervention success. Based on qualitative […]
Read MoreStates of Exception: Children’s Human Rights and the Humanities
Wendy S. Hesford
This year’s McIntyre lecturer, Wendy S. Hesford, integrates critical legal studies and feminist rhetorical criticism to examine the figure of the child as a limit condition to the liberal subject of human rights law. Through her analysis of contemporary representations of children living in varied states of political exception and social exclusion—stateless children, children born […]
Read MoreMesoamerican Biodiversity, Green Imperialism, and Indigenous Women’s Leadership in Defense of Territory
The overlap between bio-diverse and indigenous geographical areas of the world has led to a new wave of territorial dispossession. This conference will explore new forms of indigenous feminism and feminist agency being forged in the current round of struggles for the protection of territory and autonomy in Mexico and other parts of the world. […]
Read MoreGrace Paley: Speaking Truth to Power
Yvette Christiansë, Ynestra King, Nancy Kricorian, Amy Swerdlow, and a member of the Center for Immigrant Families Collective
On Grace Paley’s birthday, we present a conversation exploring how imagination, truthtelling, and courageous action flow out of Paley’s life and work. A prolific writer, Paley’s fiction highlights the everyday struggles of women, what she calls “a history of everyday life.” In addition to her writing, Paley was also a committed activist, passionate about numerous […]
Read MoreGrace Paley: Speaking Truth to Power
Recorded Dec 11, 2009
This conversation, which took place on Grace Paley's birthday, December 11, 2009, explores how imagination, truthtelling, and courageous action flow out of Paley's life and work. A prolific writer, Paley's fiction highlights the everyday struggles of women, what she calls "a history of everyday life." In addition to her writing, Paley was also a committed activist, passionate about numerous issues, including women's rights, the Vietnam War, nuclear non-proliferation, and most recently, the war in Iraq. Her death in 2007 was a great loss, but her work continues to inspire. Speakers include: Beatrix Gates, poet and publisher of Grace Paley's first book of poems; Yvette Christianse, poet and novelist; Ynestra King, ecofeminist activist and educator, and editor of Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and Development; Nancy Kricorian, New York-based writer and activist, author of Zabelle and Dreams of Bread and Fire, and coordinator of the New York City chapter of CODEPINK Women for Peace; Amy Swerdlow, founding member of Women Strike for Peace and author of Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s; and Lucila Silva and Perla Placencia, members of the Center for Immigrant Families (CIF), an inter-generational, collectively-run organization of low-income immigrant women of color and community members in Manhattan Valley.
ListenResponding to Violence, Rethinking Security: Policy Alternatives for Building Human Security
Jody Williams and BCRW
In the fall of 2002, the Center hosted Responding to Violence, a conference that brought together over twenty activists and academics whose work focused on developing alternatives to violence. In addition to a public lecture by Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams and a workshop with experts on responding to violence around the world, the conference generated a number of exciting projects, including the book Interventions co-edited by Elizabeth A. Castelli and Janet R. Jakobsen, Issue 2.2 of The Scholar & Feminist Online and the first report of the New Feminist Solutions series.
Read MoreBoys and Girls in Post-Conflict Societies
Megan Callaghan, Abosede George, Jessaca Leinaweaver, and Nara Milanich
Long after formal peace treaties have been signed, war continues to shape social institutions and interactions. Young people who have grown up amid violent conflict often experience its lingering effects through the loss of family, estrangement from local communities, destruction of the physical environment, or the instability of the government. This panel takes an interdisciplinary […]
Read MorePostcards from Tora Bora
Wazhmah Osman and Kelly Dolak
In the summer of 2004, filmmakers Wazhmah Osman and Kelly Dolak set out to make an independent film that explored whether Afghan women’s lives had actually improved as a result of the US military campaign. The documentary that came out of this question, Postcards from Tora Bora, became far more than an exploration of women’s […]
Read More