Spring 2021

This conversation brings together two novelists who thread the needle between fiction and biography. Nuala O’Connor’s Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce (HarperCollins) and Eibhear Walshe’s The Last Day at Bowen’s Court (Somerville Press) are told from the point of view of two very different Irishwomen—Nora Barnacle and Elizabeth Bowen—and draw from biographical material but are not beholden to it. In this discussion moderated by Heather Bryant Jordan, the authors will consider the relationship between history and fiction, writing writer’s lives, and writing women’s lives.

In 1973, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Collège de France on The Punitive Society that tied together the exploitation of the working class to the invention of the prison. Foucault brought together the different strands of oppression—economic, social, carceral—under the larger rubric of a “punitive society.” “The punitive society”: the central idea at the core of the critique of our contemporary society as being a “punitive society” is perhaps the thread that unites all of the sessions this year in Abolition Democracy 13/13. Not surprisingly, it is woven into the fabric of W.E.B. Du Bois’s magisterial book, Black Reconstruction in America: the central problem of racial injustice, for Du Bois, is not limited to any one particular institution—whether it is slavery, convict leasing, plantation prisons, or Jim Crow—but attaches more broadly to the society that makes possible those specific institutions of injustice. It is precisely for this reason that Du Bois militated not just for the negative abolition of unjust practices and institutions, but for the radical transformation of society and political economy.

In this seminar, we will explore the hidden damage that death sentences and executions wreak on family members of the condemned, wardens and prison guards, attorneys, chaplains, and others. The hidden traumas have, so far, received too little attention in the long struggle to abolish the death penalty. And we turn to the abolition of the federal death penalty under the presidency of Joseph Biden.

Do you listen to podcasts? Have you ever thought about making your own? What about a podcast that connects to your research, studies or academic interests in some way? If so, these workshops are for you! While making a podcast has never been simpler on a technological level, the intellectual skills needed to make a scholarly podcast are less obvious but all the more important for success. These workshops will guide you through the intellectual skills needed at each stage of the podcast production process.

A panel discussion with Manan Ahmed (History) on his new book The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India.  

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Jack Halberstam

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Dustin Stewart

This session will discuss the decades-long effort to abolish prisons spearheaded by Angela Davis and Critical Resistance. It will also broach the topic of the deinstitutionalization of asylums and mental hospitals in the 1960s, which prefigured the abolition of total institutions, but also points to certain risks and pitfalls of abolitionism.

From the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier, one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2019, stories of rural Ireland in the classic mode: full of love, melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today. 

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Khatchig Mouradian

Dramatists, scholars, and disability activists have started taking an interest in a deaf Irishwoman who was once considered the premiere national playwright of her day: Teresa Deevy. Interest in her life and works has taken different shapes, from those drawn to her representations of women living circumscribed lives in 1930s Ireland to those who want to recover a neglected history of deaf artistry. In a series of panels, we ask what it means to look in the archives for a writer as elusive as Deevy. Where do we find information about Deevy and her work, and how is this quest inflected by the needs of the present moment? This symposium will include discussions between archivists, scholars, theatre historians, disability activists, performance artists, and directors to examine the various ways of finding Deevy in a historical record that has too often blotted her out. 

“Apocalypse Pending: Religion, Politics, and Social Media” explores the growing popularity of conspiracy thinking in our current moment and its place in the history of religious movements, particularly in the US context.  It considers how new media technologies have made it possible for the dissemination of such thinking on a scale unimaginable in the past, how the moral panic it generates is impacting social and political life worldwide, and whether there are measures available to control its spread or mitigate its effects.  

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Clémence Boulouque

LIFTA x CPS presents Palestinian Feminist Discourses: Contemporary Views and Emerging Movements, a live panel as part of the program 'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN'. Joining us from Gaza, Haifa, and Ramallah, the panel introduces new feminist movements that are gaining momentum across historic Palestine. It's a discussion highlighting shared desires and the varying approaches to organizing and mobilizing based on locality and the different faces of Israeli oppression. Topics will include contemporary political feminist movements, queer feminist activism, and feminism as a human rights issue. It addresses how these new movements have been inspired by or, on the contrary, depart from past Palestinian feminist movements

Based on interviews with parents of children with Down syndrome, as well as women who terminated their pregnancies because their fetus was identified as having the condition, Unexpected paints an intimate, nuanced picture of reproductive choice in today’s world. Piepmeier takes us inside her own daughter’s life, showing how Down syndrome is misunderstood, stigmatized, and condemned, particularly in the context of prenatal testing.

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind

Lucienne Peiry in conversation with Camille Robcis

This seminar will explore the campaign to end the family policing system (child protection services and foster care) with one of the nation’s leading thinkers on the topic, Professor Dorothy Roberts.

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Kaiama L. Glover

The coronavirus pandemic inaugurated a global shift to online learning, working, and socializing. This event considers the immediate and longterm effects such a move has on parents and on forms of mothering in particular. Our panelists will discuss the history, theory, and data of mother's health decision making and pandemic-related disruptions to the family, as well as of familial navigation of disability, education, and adaptive digital devices.

“Oil abolition implies social transformation—a systemic change toward collective freedom,” Reinhold Martin writes. In this seminar, we will explore the relation between fossil fuels and social inequality, and focus on efforts, like the Green New Deal, to abolish oil dependency.

On June the 7th 2020, a group of Black demonstrators scaled a statue of King Leopold II in Brussels, Belgium and brandished the flag of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; chanting one word repeatedly: “Reparations”. Demands for reparations for slavery and colonialism are occurring across multiple scales and locales, in various forms, and have intensified in the context of the global movement for Black Lives. An increasing number of institutions, NGO’s and even states are responding to reparations demands: sometimes by acknowledging their moral legitimacy, rarely by addressing their material merits. This webinar series investigates the significance of a global turn towards demands for reparatory justice for slavery and colonialism, and probes the terms upon which reparations would be capable of both enacting repair and account for social inequality in capitalist, white supremacist, and settler colonial contexts.  Acknowledging the global implications of racialized forms of oppressions, the series prioritizes an international framing of the question of reparatory justice and asks us to ponder the possibilities and the impossibilities of reparations for slavery and colonialism: What is the relationship between reparatory justice and the possibility of the abolition of the carceral state? What could material reparations for histories of colonialism and enslavement look like, how might they be adjudicated and administered? What is the relationship between claims for reparations, studies of repair, and liberal progressive state logics?

Stéphane Vieyra, son of Beninese/Senegalese filmmaker Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, joins Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Mamadou Diouf to discuss Africa on the Seine and other short documentary films made by Vieyra,  considered the first sub-Saharan African film director. Their discussion will explore his films, produced between 1955 and 1981, as a key oeuvre of this period of African independence and nation-building. 

In this conversation about Faat Kiné, a 2001 film directed by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, we will be joined by Mariama Baldé, a Senegalese actress who plays a role in this film, and who previously studied the films of Ousmane Sembene, and by Columbia Professors Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Mamadou Diouf.  

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Reinhold Martin

“The feudal system was once deeply entrenched. So was the institution of slavery. For a long time, there was no real hope of changing those social systems. Yet criticism was still appropriate,” Joseph Carens argues. It is time, now, to ask fundamental questions about the justice of borders. This seminar will explore those questions in all their complexity, including the fraught relation between borders and colonialism. We will also discuss the movement to Abolish I.C.E.

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: Celebrating Recent Work by Hamid Dabashi

We end our Abolition 13/13 series looking forward to the possibility of an abolitionist future with special consideration of reparations. What will it take to get there? What will it look like? How soon will we be there?