Welcome Letter from the Director

September 17, 2009

Welcome back! I hope you had a productive summer. At CSER, we worked on a variety of exciting projects, so we would like to take this opportunity to bring you up to date on our various developments and ongoing projects.

First, it is my pleasure to welcome two new faculty members, Professors Catherine Fennell and John Gamber. I would also like to welcome back our preceptor Anjuli Kolb, and introduce Mr. James McGirk, who will be working with us to develop CSER’s website and other communications.

Also, please mark your calendars to attend CSER's "Fall Open House" this coming September 24. For faculty and staff, this is the perfect moment to meet our students and enjoy the occasion. In addition to hors d'oeuvres and refreshments, this year we will be hosting master pianist Hector Martignon, who will play from his broad repertoire of Latin Jazz music.

Regarding our retreat, our application to hold the event at the Pocantico Conference Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has been approved. The retreat will be held there on October 16, 2009. More details will be forthcoming very soon.

Conversations around CSER's curriculum are also going forward. CSER is now working with Barnard and other Columbia units to create joint teaching and program opportunities. Furthermore, CSER is hosting a meeting on our innovative Native American studies concentration. As part of this process, CSER will co-sponsor two major conferences on the subject, and will accept Professor Karl Kroeber's generous donation of his 300-volume Native American studies collection, which will be housed in the new CSER reading room.

We are also very excited to co-sponsor a series of events, including a major conference on the caste system in India and crime in modern Mexico. In addition, CSER has begun efforts to create a "race, ethnicity and visual culture" track that will enable students to study visual culture and produce independent media. A new public speaker series on student professional development beyond the completion of the degree is currently in the works.

I look forward to seeing you at CSER.

Best wishes and warm regards,

Frances Negrón-Muntaner,
Director
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race

July 2009

Professor Frances Negron-Muntaner is appointed the new Director of CSER.

From the Director

The 2008-09 academic year is starting with an exceptional set of planned and charted activities, work from past years of labor that has come to fruition, and new challenges for the future. Our reformed college curriculum is now in place, and our students will be introduced to CSER's new general core courses for the first time; CSER-led efforts to strengthen Native American Studies at this university have begun to yield significant results; CSER's acquisition of a Provost's Academic Quality Fund grant one year ago has funded a number of student and faculty projects, many of which will be carried out in the course of this academic year; CSER will be inaugurating a new speaker series, and a new program targeted especially to undergraduates who are interested in community involvement; there will be several academic conferences occurring this year, and a multi-year project initiated by CSER faculty for the new Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. These initiatives and projects have been the result of the last two years of work at the Center, and I am delighted to present the Columbia community with this exciting array of programs.

As for this year’s challenges, the Center will be conducting two open-rank searches this year, which are critical to its consolidation and growth. In addition, an academic review of the Center will continue and conclude in the course of the fall semester. In short, this will be a year of critical reflection and growth.

The intensity of work at CSER has been such that I must begin this letter by thanking our students, our faculty, a supportive administration and university community, and especially our staff—Leon Bynum and Theresa Hernandez—for their commitment to shaping an energized and deeply engaged intellectual environment for the Center.

Here are the details of this year’s plans and programs.

New and Returning Faculty. I would like to begin by welcoming new and returning faculty to the Center.

Professor Ana María Ochoa has just joined our permanent faculty at Columbia with an appointment in the Music Department and membership in our Center. Professor Ochoa is a specialist on culture, media and politics. She works on transnationalism, public policy, social movements and popular music in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and New York. She joins Columbia from NYU, where she was Associate Professor of Music. In addition to Ana María Ochoa's teaching and her work as Director of the Ethnomusicology Program, Professor Ochoa will be organizing a conference titled "Digital Archives, Informal Economies and Socio-Political Logics of Heterogeneity" in the Spring of 2009, co-funded by CSER's Academic Quality Fund.

I am delighted to welcome Professor Audra Simpson, who joins us as Assistant Professor of Anthropology and member of the Center. Audra Simpson comes to us from Cornell University. Professor Simpson’s research is on Native American and US politics of recognition. She will be spending the 08-09 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and will take up her teaching duties the following academic year. However, we will have a chance to welcome her at our events this year. Audra Simpson's presence, and the exciting addition of post-doctoral fellow Dr. Chie Sakakibara (see below), substantially enhances CSER's ability to provide courses and research opportunities in Native American Studies. Information on courses in Native American Studies at Columbia is now centralized in CSER's website, check it out.

I am also delighted to welcome Professor Chie Sakakibara, who will be with us on a post-doctoral fellowship for two academic years. Dr. Sakakibara comes to us from the University of Oklahoma, with innovative research on the politics of climate change among the Inuit. We will be sharing Dr. Sakakibara’s time with the Earth Institute and the Music Department.

Professor Susanna Rosenbaum will be with us for a second year as Visiting Assistant Professor. Dr. Rosenbaum's research on domestic work, the service economy and Latino migrations energized our students and enriched our course offerings last year, and we are delighted that she will continue to be with us for an additional year.

On a sadder note for us, I wish to report the departure from our University of Professors Sandhya Shukla and Coco Fusco. We congratulate them and wish them well in their new positions. Professor Shukla has accepted an appointment in the English Department at the University of Virginia, while Professor Fusco has accepted the position of Chair of the Fine Arts Department at the Parsons School of Design. I would like to give special thanks to Sandhya for the work that she did to bring South Asian immigration to the United States to the fore at our Center, and more generally for her years of outstanding teaching here. CSER will also miss Coco's courses on race and photography, I thank her for sharing her insights as a practicing artist with our undergraduate students.

Returning from academic leave this year are Professor Frances Negrón-Muntaner, who was at UCLA, Professor Nicholas de Genova, who was at the University of Warwick, and Professor Pablo Piccato, who was at the University of California-San Diego. Welcome back!

New CSER Core Begins. The reforms to the CSER curriculum that were first sketched out in 2006-07 are now in place. Most important is the establishment of a common core for all of our majors and concentrators, composed of two courses: Colonizations-Decolonizations, which will be team-taught by Professor Mae Ngai and myself this Fall, and Race in Scientific and Social Practice which will be taught in the Spring by Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. These two courses provide a common conceptual and historical foundation for CSER students. We are very excited about offering this new opportunity to our students. I wish to thank Professor Mae Ngai and Professor Abu El-Haj for their leadership in developing these offerings, and College Deans Yatrakis and Quigley for their support for curricular development. We welcome student feedback in this first pilot year.

New Faculty Searches and the CSER Seminar. CSER will be conducting two open-rank searches this academic year, one with the English Department and the other with the Anthropology Department. We anticipate an exciting set of speakers coming through early in the spring semester.

In addition to those speakers, and thanks to financial support from the Vice-Provost for Diversity Initiatives Geraldine Downey, we have instated a new CSER Speakers Seminar. In the Fall Semester we have invited talks by Professor David Roman of USC, Professors Mary Louise Pratt and Renato Rosaldo of NYU, and Professor Adam Ashforth of the University of Michigan. Publicity with details on these events will be forthcoming.

Undergraduate Student Preceptor and Student Conference. I am delighted to welcome Ms. Anjuli Raza Kolb as CSER's graduate student preceptor for the 2008-09 academic year, and I wish to thank Mr. Horace Grant for his work as preceptor last year. Anjuli will contact juniors and seniors who are planning to work on senior research projects, and they can reach her at ark35@columbia.edu. Also, after three consecutive years of success, the Center has renewed its commitment to sponsor a yearly student conference. Ms. Raza Kolb will be the point person and organizer of that event this year. Students interested in participating and helping with the organization should contact Anjuli as soon as possible.

Borders and Boundaries. CSER was one of the founding parties in Columbia's brand-new Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference (CCASD), and one of CSER's projects, titled "Borders and Boundaries," has been adopted and funded by CCASD. Borders and Boundaries is a multi-year research project, directed by Professors Elizabeth Povinelli and myself. It focuses on the connection between international immigration and racial boundaries in the contemporary world. This year we will be running an international conference on the subject (Spring Semester). I invite the CSER community to tune-in to CCASD's activities, which are very much inflected by our collective research interests. CCASD activities can be tracked on their new website.

CSER-Revson Community Organizer Lecture Series. The Revson Fellowship Program and CSER are proud to announce the start of a new program. Each year the Revson Program brings 10 activist-scholars to spend a year at Columbia University to get time for study, reflection and planning. This year we have invited the Revson Fellows to present their organizations to our undergraduate students. The aim of the exercise is to provide our students with detailed knowledge of community work as it currently exists. Students are invited to volunteer to collaborate and assist in these ventures. A number of Revson Fellows are interested in finding Columbia students who might wish to collaborate and help out in their projects with their research, time and ideas, and our students have repeatedly expressed a desire to have more opportunities for community involvement. Professor Sudhir Venkatesh, Director of the Revson Program, and I are very excited about the possibilities of this program into the future.

ARC Review. One of the agreements that emerged from last year’s student strike was that CSER would undergo an Academic Review. Some work for that review was initiated in the spring of 2008, but the process, including interviews with ARC internal and external committees, will continue through the fall semester. ARC reviews require the participation of faculty and students. We expect many good things to come from this exercise in critical self-inspection.

Nahuatl Program - The First Steps

Assistant Professor in History and CSER Affiliate, Caterina Pizzigoni, is spearheading Columbia's involvement in the consortium that Yale and Chicago created to promote the teaching of Nahuatl, the indigenous language of central Mexico.

President Bollinger Visits CSER

On Friday, September 14, the CSER Board welcomed President Lee C. Bollinger to the Center for a briefing on the state of CSER and its activities.

Welcome Leon Bynum, Assistant Director of CSER

CSER is delighted to welcome Leon Bynum as its new Assistant Director. We are fortunate to have him join our ranks as Assistant Director, and we expect much from him as an unusually innovative administrative officer. Please join us in welcoming Leon Bynum.

Curricular Reform

The faculty and students of CSER have been involved in extended conversations on curricular reform this year. In addition to streamlining requirements for our three majors—a set of minor reforms that will be in place for 2007-08—the faculty will develop three new core courses that will be shared by all majors. One course will be an historical survey of race and subject formation from the early modern period to the present; the second will focus on contemporary “ethnoscapes,” that is, it shall explore the connection between globalization and ethnic formation; finally, the third course will be a methods seminar that fosters the development of research projects with real world implications. The faculty also agreed to make the senior thesis course—a program that was piloted this year—a compulsory part of the curriculum. This plan is now moving into development. CSER plans to introduce the new courses and new major requirements by the spring of 2008.

Collaboration with Intercultural Resource Center

Ajay Nair, Associate Dean of Student Affairs, has put together a successful proposal for the expansion of the Intercultural Resource Center, with space for 9 more student residents. The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race is currently working with the IRC and the Office of Multicultural Affairs to develop an academic curriculum with these students that will be attentive to their concern with community development. These programs will begin in the spring of 2008.

6 April 2007

The Center launched its new website!