Welcome from Co-Directors Premilla Nadasen and Janet Jakobsen
We are very excited to begin our new roles as co-directors of BCRW. We would first like to extend our deepest gratitude to Professor Elizabeth Castelli for leading BCRW over the last four years and a huge thanks to the staff for all their hard work. We are proud to be a part of a center that has a rich and illustrious history and that has been on the cutting edge of feminist research and activism for decades.
We look forward to working together over the next year to continue to bring to you the research and scholarship that BCRW is known for through ongoing initiatives such as the annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, which will be in its 48th iteration in the spring, the more recent Social Justice Initiative, and The Scholar and Feminist Online along with our video projects for teaching and activism. Thanks to some incredibly hard work over the last year, we’re happy to announce the launch of a newly redesigned website for The Scholar and Feminst Online. Please take a look as we carry on BCRW’s historic work in new and exciting ways.
For the fall semester, BCRW has a stellar line up of core and co-sponsored programming that addresses a range of urgent social justice feminist issues including abolitionist feminism, mutual aid, and Palestine. One highpoint will be the Helen Pond McIntyre Lecture delivered by Dána-Ain Davis on her new book Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (2020). Professor Davis and our Columbia colleague, Sarah Haley, will discuss the import of Black maternal mortality and the crucial role of reproductive justice movements both historically and in this pressing historical moment. We will also host a panel discussion in celebration of an ongoing BCRW project spearheaded by Janet Jakobsen and Elizabeth Bernstein that began with a double issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online in 2012-2013 and has culminated in the recent publication of a book, The Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Sex, Gender, and Possibilities for Justice (2021). Even as we are troubled by the recent turn of events, we are optimistic about the future and our power to shape that future. As our colleagues so aptly put it, much of the work of BCRW opens up such possibilities for justice.
As we begin the academic year with anticipation and excitement, we very much look forward to seeing many of you again. Alongside our larger and geographically dispersed on-line community, we are eager to reconnect with our local community in person, a community that has been core to BCRW and feminist movements.
Please join us for our fall programming, and look out for a new issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, “Race-ing Queens,” guest edited by Sonja Drimmer, Mira Kafantaris, and Treva Lindsay coming out this fall.
With appreciation,
Premilla Nadasen and Janet Jakobsen, Co-Directors
Premilla Nadasen is Claire Tow Professor of History, Barnard College. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and serves on the scholarly advisory committee of the New York Historical Society’s Center for Women’s History. She is past president of the National Women’s Studies Association and was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Oxford University in 2019. She is the 2020 inaugural recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize for outstanding feminist activist and intellectual work. She is the author of Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women who Built a Movement (Beacon Press, 2015); Rethinking the Welfare Rights Movement (Routledge 2012); Welfare in the United States: A History with Documents, co-authored with Jennifer Mittelstadt and Marisa Chappell (Routledge 2009); and Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge, 2005). She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.
Janet Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College. She served for 15 years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and she has also served as Barnard’s Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development and Chair of the President’s Committee on Online and On-Campus Learning (COOL). Most recently she co-edited with Elizabeth Bernstein Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Sex, Gender and Possibilities for Justice (Routledge, 2021). She is the author of The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (NYU Press, 2020) and Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Indiana University Press, 1998). With Ann Pellegrini she co-wrote Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Beacon Press, 2003), and co-edited Secularisms (Duke University Press, 2008). With Elizabeth Castelli she co-edited Interventions: Academics and Activists Respond to Violence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Fall Programs at BCRW
Events are free and open to all. ASL interpretation is provided with live transcription included for online events. Times are listed in Eastern Standard Time.
Co-hosted with the Barnard Archives and Special Collections
Listening to the Archives: Movements Against Women’s Imprisonment
A conversation with Anisah Sabur-Mumin, Andrea Williams, and Rhea Mallet, moderated by Obden Mondésir
Wednesday, September 28, 6:00 p.m.
Online
Co-sponsored by the Center for Engaged Pedagogy, Barnard College
Choice or Chance? Driver-labor and Reproductive Justice
A lunchtime lecture by Julietta Hua and Kasturi Ray (BC ’89)
Thursday, September 29, 12:00 p.m.
BCRW Conference Room, 614 Milstein Center, Barnard College
Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Sex, Gender, and Possibilities for Justice
A conversation with Janet Jakobsen, Elizabeth Bernstein, Ana Amuchástegui, Sealing Cheng, Abosede George, Maja Horn, Kerwin Kaye, Tami Navarro, Mark Padilla, Mario Pecheny, Sine Plambech, and Svati Shah
Thursday, October 6, 6:00 p.m.
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall, Barnard College
Reproductive Injustice
The Helen Pond McIntyre ’28 Lecture by Dána-Ain Davis, in conversation with Sarah Haley
Wednesday, October 19, 6:00 p.m.
Event Oval, The Diana Center, Barnard College
Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America
Nadia Abu El-Haj in conversation with Anjali Kamat
Tuesday, October 25, 6:00 p.m.
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall, Barnard College
Abolish Mandatory Reporting and Family Policing
Erin Miles Cloud, Jasmine Wali, and Shannon Perez-Darby, in conversation with Dean Spade
Thursday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.
Online
This event is made possible by the Patricia Wismer Professorship in Gender and Diversity at Seattle University.
Image Credit: Tia Ali
No borders! No prisons! No cops! No war! No state?
A conversation with Harsha Walia, William Anderson, Gord Hill, and Dean Spade
Tuesday, November 15, 7:00 p.m.
Online
Co-Sponsored Programs
Presented by the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University
Mother of Strangers
Novelist Suad Amiry in conversation with Rashid Khalidi
Monday, September 19, 12:10 p.m.
BCRW Conference Room, 614 Milstein Center, Barnard College
Two-day symposium presented by the Department of Theatre, Barnard College, the Department of History, University of Victoria, and the Department of Theatre History, Loyola Marymount College
Labor of Love: Performance and Politics in the South Asian Diaspora
Friday, September 23 – Saturday, September 24
Glicker Milstein Theatre, Barnard College
Presented by the Barnard College Diversity Council, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, co-sponsored by BCRW and the Athena Center
The Grace Lee Boggs ’35 Lecture by Ai-jen Poo, President of the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance
Wednesday, October 12, 4:00 p.m.
Event Oval, The Diana Center, Barnard College
Details coming soon
Presented by the Barnard Archives and Special Collections
Abolitionist Feminism in the Archive
A conversation with Sarah Haley and Emily Thuma, moderated by Eve Glazier (BC ’23)
Wednesday, October 26, 6:00 p.m. ET
Online
Presented by the Barnard Archives and Special Collections
Teaching with the Archive: Feminist Abolition
Workshop facilitated by Malkia Okech
Wednesday, December 7, 6:00 p.m.
LL002, Milstein Center, Barnard College
Center News
Last spring, BCRW’s Housing and Poverty Project collaborated with the National Public Housing Museum (NPHM) in Chicago to coordinate a series of summer workshops for residents of New York City Housing complexes across the five boroughs. At the workshops, residents curated materials that will be included in the inaugural exhibit History Lessons: Everyday Objects from the History of Public Housing at the National Public Housing Museum, to open in November 2023.
In August, BCRW launched a new website for The Scholar and Feminist Online, our peer-reviewed, open-source journal, complete with a new indexing system for readers to navigate two decades of writing, video, and art. Using the index, we are developing a glossary of terms to contribute to the growing body of work by librarians and researchers to shift collective discourse and analysis. Look out for this new resource and a new issue of the journal, “Race-ing Queens,” guest edited by Sonja Drimmer, Mira Kafantaris, and Treva Lindsay, this fall.
BCRW’s Transnational Feminisms Initiative is working in partnership with Brooklyn-based Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees (HWHR) on two public education and community resource projects. The first is Rezistans: Resisting Racism Against Haitian Refugees and Immigrants, a report by Jessica Coffrin-St. Julien and Helen Avery Campbell, introduction and foreword by Haitian author Edwidge Danticat (BC ’89), and project advising from Ninaj Raoul, Executive Director of HWHR. The second is a short, bilingual (Kreyol and English) “Know Your Rights” video to help refugees navigate asylum and formal immigration status after crossing the U.S./Mexico border without authorization. We look forward to sharing these projects in the coming months.
“Title IX: Activism On and Off the Field,” an exhibition at the New York Historical Society on view during the spring and summer, featured videos from the series Building Accountable Communities, produced by BCRW and collaborators Mariame Kaba and Dean Spade.
In August, BCRW RA Eve Glazier (BC ‘23), Chalay Chalermkraivuth (CU ‘21), and Mariame Sissoko (BC ‘24) published an op-ed in the Columbia Spectator, “The ‘feminist jail’ in Harlem isn’t feminist—it’s regressive, anti-Black, and supported by the Columbia Justice Lab,” where they describe the proposal to replace Rikers Island Correctional Facility, slated to be closed in 2027, with four new jails, and why no jail is a solution to social problems or safe for human life.
Finally, in a few weeks we will be joined by Kasturi Ray (BC ‘83) and Julietta Hua, co-authors of Spent Behind the Wheel (2022) for a lunchtime lecture to discuss taxi driver labor and reproductive justice. For an introduction to their work, read “Choice or Chance?”, an essay excerpted from a longer work forthcoming in Critical Ethnic Studies (Volume 8, Issue 1).
About the header image: BCRW Advisory Board meeting in the office, 1996. Pictured are Sue L. Sacks, Department of Psychology (left), Quandra Prettyman, Department of English (second from left).