A joint venture between Columbia University, Barnard College and New York University's Caribbeanist faculty, the Caribbean Faculty Working Group arose through conversations among faculty members from different disciplines with a shared scholarly interest in the Caribbean region and its diaspora. The Working Group is interested in contributing to a comparative and interdisciplinary method of pursuing Caribbean Studies, which includes the study of Central American and Latin American Caribbean coastal regions, as well as northern Brazil. It also hopes to offer an interface between a more traditionally conceived Caribbean Studies and adjacent projects such as Atlantic Studies, pan-Africanism, Latino Studies, and various diaspora studies. The Working Group will launch a Caribbean Studies public speaker series in the Fall.
Launched in 2010, the Native American/Indigenous Studies Project's goals are to increase capacity building for Native American/Indigenous Studies at Columbia in the areas of teaching, research, and public programming. Current projects in development include: a speaker series featuring scholars, political figures, and artists; a guest speaker series on topics for Native American courses; and the creation of a research and teaching fund for Native Americanist/Indigenous Studies faculty.
In 2008, Columbia became an institutional member of New York University's Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. Beginning on May 2010, CSER became the home of Columbia's Hemi Working Group.
Led by graduate students, the aim of the Workshop on Critical Approaches to Race and Ethnicity is to create an interdisciplinary space for the critical consideration of race and ethnicity. By bringing together a diverse community of scholars and activists, we seek to examine racial and ethnic formations, and engage race and ethnicity as categories of analysis in order to address larger social, cultural, economic, and political questions across geographical boundaries. The Workshop will serve as a space for scholars to develop and share ideas, drawing upon the personal and academic experiences of the Columbia University community. To participate or submit a project to the workshop, please contact us at raceandethnicitygroup@gmail.com.
A current thriving student project is being led by CSER major and rising senior Amanda Mattos (CC ’13) is leading the WomanHOOD Project, a new program that teaches high school girls in the Bronx the skills to become social and political activists. HOOD stands for Helping Ourselves Overcome Discrimination, and their mission is to simultaneously reclaim the hood and womanhood to promote racial justice andgender equality. Topics will include Feminism, Ethnic Studies, Progressivism, Leadership, and Body Image. The project will be launched at Bronx Leadership Academy II on September 28 andColumbia faculty lectures to the high school students are programmed to begin in spring 2013.
If you attend a nearby NYC school and are interested in getting involved, please email Amanda Matos at amatos8291@gmail.com.
For more information, check out our Facebook Fan Page and promotional video:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/TheWomanhoodProject
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zMv0Hv8FGM
A group of graduate students formed the Collaboration on Indigenous Studies Project (CISP). CISP seeks to pursue collaborations in the field of Indigenous Studies at Columbia University dedicated to addressing and discussing indigenous issues at the University. CISP immediately got to work on putting together the first evergraduate-organized and graduate-led conference on Indigenous Studies that ran in conjunction with CSER’s Indigenous Forum and brought together graduate students as well as senior scholars from as close as Binghamton University and as far as the University of Hawaii at M'noa.