We imagine a university of possibilities. "Labor in Context" is a free student-organized event on March 15 and 16, open to all, involving a full-day workshop and a series of drop-in trainings. Rather than presenting papers, we will be sharing strategies for bettering our universities and communities founded in reflection on labor in the university. The workshop is organized by graduate students from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Read our original call for proposals here.
10:00AM Lounge
Coffee and Breakfast
10:30AM
Thinking Backwards: How to Assume We Have Everything
(and the institution has nothing)
Natalia Nakazawa
Location: Komoda Room
In this workshop, participants will examine the concept of “having.” Who has what? How does “having” or “not having” impact the way we move, act, think, and feel? How can we shapeshift this paradigm into a position of generosity, as opposed to scarcity? What if it meant asking better questions? We will look at 4 different types of models of knowledge creation and collaboratively come up with answers through the production of hand-drawn zines.
Action Across Oceans: How to Build and Sustain a Movement While Abroad
Xiaowen Liang and Winnie Shen, Chinese Feminist Collective
Location: Common Room
Strategies and tactics that CFC has utilized to a great deal of success involve hosting talks at universities, feminist training camps, performance art, and informal “story telling” dinners. These various actions serve to not only increase international awareness but also radicalize Chinese students before they return to an oppressive state. This workshop will focus on how to mobilize non-traditional activist methods, including street and performance art, to build consciousness and develop a constituency in multiple locales.
11:45PM
Surviving Precarious Labor
Lucy Hunter and Clynton Lowry, Art Handler
Location: Common Room
This workshop will address preparedness and survival in the face of precarious labor conditions: adjunct teaching, the gig economy, government shutdowns, et al. Taking a page from doomsday preppers, the online community of readiness aficionados, workshop participants will have a chance to design a survival kit tailored to the needs of the modern 1099 contractor.
Extra Credit
Natasha Bunten
Location: Komoda Room
Why does most writing in the humanities get credited to just one person? Why are most artworks attributed to one artist? This workshop will aim to map out the kinds of collaboration, credited and uncredited, compensated and uncompensated, that underpin all academic and artistic labor. Participants will walk away from this interactive activity with a model for an exhaustive "credit roll"---perhaps like those used in the movie industry---that they can apply to their own work, and an awareness of both the significance and limitations of giving credit where it's due in our work.
1:00PM
Lunch
Location: Lounge
2:00PM
Governance and the University
A conversation with Rebecca E Karl
Location: Common Room
2:30PM
Hacking Old Age through Broken Machines
Katryn Evinson
Location: Common Room
In a project I am currently developing as part of the Public Humanities fellowship, I am working with elder communities constructing alternative narratives about technology and decrepitude in order to open up new ways of thinking about technology that are detached from instrumentality and productivity. The project culminates with a series of workshops where participants experiment with obsolete and broken technology to develop their own creative works whereby they aim to engage other meanings of technology concerning repair, recycling, and non-instrumentality. In this paper, I will share the findings obtained so far from the workshops while providing a theoretical analysis of the paradoxes risen as a result of the encounter of the aged and technology.
Department Mapping and Organizing
Sonam Singh
Location: Komoda Room
Bringing his experience organizing with other adjuncts at Barnard College, Singh will lead a workshop on power mapping and member networking at the university and in your department. These skills are aimed at strengthening union power at Columbia after union recognition and look to current and future labor struggles at the university.
3:45PM
Ad-hocification and Adjuncts in the Indian University
Sanchita Khurana
Location: Komoda Room
Join Khurana for discussion about labor conditions and subjectivity for adjuncts at her home university, faculty solidarity, and transnational university comparison.
Sick and Tired: Illness, Disability, and University Labor
Liz Bowen
Location: Common Room
Health care tends to be a major talking point for university labor movements, and for good reason. Contingent workers are often stuck with high premiums and deductibles and shoddy health services, with limited hours and overbooked medical professionals—if they are offered health coverage at all. Meanwhile, university offices of disability services, most of whose users are undergraduates, don't always seem relevant to other university community members' particular needs. This workshop will focus on how the specific conditions in which we are able, or unable, to care for our bodyminds affect our working and learning conditions. In other words, how do the experiences of illness, disability, and negotiating inadequate health care systems affect our relationships to study? As a group of variously abled and disabled workers and learners, we will think together about what it might it look like to cultivate systems of care, access, and accommodation that nurture, rather than strain, those relationships.
5:00PM
Network to Support Net Worth
Janelle Naomi Rouse
Location: Board Room
In this class, we will conduct a cost-benefit analysis of receiving a higher education in America, thinking about what we value and why. It is often said that one's network is their net worth, however, in this consumerism, capitalistic country that we live in, it is important to re-evaluate what we associate with a person's net worth. Viewing a net worth from a more holistic perspective, we know that it is important to have money in this country because it is vital to our survival and quality of life. Moving through this workshop, we will develop through interactive activities a critical system to analyze the value that a degree and more money places on our lives and compare that to the same value that connections and a powerful network place on our lives. We will peruse ways to expand and deepen our connections by developing a network that is powerful in its potential and integral to our lives thriving.
Decolonizing Curricula
Sydnee Corriders, Ama Konadu, and Elise Jayakar
Location: Common Room
During their time at Columbia School of Social Work (CSSW), Sydnee Corriders, LMSW, Ama Konadu, LMSW, and Elise Jayakar, MSW were student organizers in the movement for racial and social justice. Their work together began in the development of a Power, Racism, Oppression, and Privilege (PROP) course, which was introduced into the required curriculum of the school by student demands. Following the development of the course, there was resistance to implement the agreed-upon demand, and student organizers were forced to advocate for its implementation. Now the course is entitled, Foundations: Decolonizing Social Work and is mandatory for all first-year students, with Fall of 2018 being the first iteration of the material. As alumni, Sydnee, Ama, and Elise all work as Racial Equity Consultants. Since the initial rollout of the course, they have consulted for CSSW to support in the continued growth and success of the class.
6:30PM
Dinner
Whisper Networks
SCA Pizza Party
Location: Common Room
SCA Pizza Party will be guiding a dinnertime whisper network activity. Giving a short introduction to the Pizza Party group, which formed in the wake of sexual harassment scandals at NYU, we will try out their techniques for improving whisper networks and graduate worker solidarity in ways that circumvent the university’s existing, flawed grievance procedures – while enjoying delicious pizza (gluten-free and vegan options available!).
followed by
The Art of Marketing
Satpreet Kahlon
Location: Common Room
Tentative description: in this zine-making workshop, participants will deconstruct marketing materials from their home institutions with an attention to what is occluded in these materials in the drive for recruitment and fundraising. In the end, we will make brochures about our institutions “as they really are,” failings, aspirations, and all.
10AM-1PM
Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon
Oluremi Onabanjo
Art+Feminism is a campaign improving coverage of cis and transgender women, non-binary folks, feminism and the arts on Wikipedia. From coffee shops and community centers to the largest museums and universities in the world, Art+Feminism is a do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others campaign teaching people of all gender identities and expressions to edit Wikipedia. This three-hour session, organized in conjunction with Labor In Context by Oluremi Onabanjo (Art History) invites people of all gender identities and expressions to address the gender imbalance on Wikipedia by participating in communal updating of Wikipedia’s entries on art and feminism. Our focus will be on editing, translating, improving and starting entries on artists of color.
10AM-11PM
Introduction to Deescalation
Nolan Gear
De-escalation refers to ways of preventing the escalation of tension into open conflict. This introductory conversation will invite us to think about approaches to recognizing potential conflict and how to de-escalate situations safely and respectfully.
11:15-12:15PM
Copwatch Training
NOTE: THIS WORKSHOP IS CANCELLED! Sorry...
Copwatch Patrol Unit (CPU) Harlem
Cop-watching involves documenting police activity as a non-violent form of protest and deterrent to police brutality. Around the country, a network of regular people take up cameras to bear witness to police actions and hold law enforcement accountable. Join experienced members of Copwatch Patrol Unit Harlem for an introductory training in best practices in bearing witness to law enforcement actions, including do’s and don’ts.
12:30PM-1:45PM
Street Action Readiness Training
NYC Action Medical
Learn basic readiness skills for street actions like moving in groups, first aid, and eye flushes. The training will be lead by NYC Action Medical, a group of volunteer street medics who offer emergency care at protests, direct actionss, and other sites of resistance and struggle.
2-5PM
A Conversation on Race and Racism
Milta Vega-Cardona
This conversation, facilitated by Vega-Cardona, an Organizer and Core Trainer with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), will draw on methods honed in Undoing Racism, a 2.5 day workshop run by PISAB challenges participants to analyze the structures of power and privilege that hinder social equity and prepares social workers to be effective organizers for justice. Through dialogue, reflection, role-playing, strategic planning and presentations, this workshop stresses learning from history, developing leadership, maintaining accountability to communities of color, creating networks, undoing internalized oppression, and understanding the role of organizational gatekeeping in perpetuating racism.
Anayvelyse Allen-Mossman is a poet, translator, and researcher. She is a doctoral candidate in Latin American and Iberian Cultures and ICLS at Columbia University, completing a dissertation on nineteenth and twentieth century railway construction in the Southern Cone of South America. She is also writing The Family, Where Love Abides and Happiness Abounds, a history in photographs of family. www.anayvelyse.com
Liz Bowen is a poet and critic living in New York. She is the author of Sugarblood (Metatron 2017) and the chapbook Compassion Fountain (Hyacinth Girl 2018), and her poetry and essays can be found in The New Inquiry, American Poetry Review, Lit Hub, Boston Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Atlas Review, Dream Pop Press, and glitterMOB. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she is working on a dissertation that traces disability and animality as intertwined sites of literary experimentation in the long twentieth century. She also teaches undergraduate writing, is a poetry editor for Peach Mag, and cares for a rescue pit bull named Rose.
Natasha Bunten is a nonprofit consultant and arts administrator. Previously, she served as Deputy Director of Artis in New York and Tel Aviv, and worked for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She lectures on professional development for art workers and with students at NYU, MICA, Parsons, and USC San Diego. She is co-founder of Art + Economics Laboratory, an itinerant educational project that investigates cultural labor in the U.S. economic system. Natasha holds a B.F.A. in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a M.A. in Museum Studies from New York University.
Copwatch Harlem is a group dedicated to observing and publicizing information about the armed thugs that patrol our neighborhoods and streets to enforce an oppressive social order based upon exclusion, violence and mass exploitation.
Sydnee Corriders, LMSW, in addition to working as a racial equity consultant, works with STEPS to End Family Violence as a Clinical Supervisor for a school-based program seeking to promote healthy relationships and prevent and support those impacted by intimate partner violence.
Katryn Evinson is a Ph.D. student in Latin American & Iberian Cultures concentrating on nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century Spain as its issues prove relevant to more global matters beyond Spanish borders. In her research she is drawn to debates centered on the histories of political interruption of capitalism. More specifically, she examines how contemporary cultural production reimagines those very histories as they are expressed in literature, art, theory and politics.
Nolan Gear is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, where he researches the relays between early film and literature.
C. T. Hoffman is a researcher, writer, and organizer with the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council. They are a doctoral student in German Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where they focus on communism, gender, and literary studies.
Sonam Singh is Bargaining Unit Chair of Barnard Contingent Faculty-UAW Local 2110 (BCF-UAW) and an Adjunct Lecturer in the English Department at Barnard College.
SCA Pizza Party is a group of students from the NYU Department of Social Cultural Analysis formed to address sexual harassment and student exploitation in a hyperfocused, hyperlocal setting.
Lucy Hunter is the managing editor of Art Handler magazine. She is a PhD candidate in the History of Art department at Yale University, where her dissertation explores intersections of experimental art and corporate culture in the Cold War era.
Elise Jayakar, MSW, in addition to working as a racial equity consultant, serves as the Director of Youth Development and Outreach at The Youth Activists-Youth Allies (YA-YA) Network, an organization with a mission to create the next generation of activists.
Rebecca E Karl teaches on modern China, gender, and social theory in the History Department. She was also centrally involved in organizing votes of no confidence by faculties of various schools in NYU against then-President John Sexton.
Xiaowen Liang is a Chinese feminist activist and has organized as well as participated in campaigns such as “Occupying Men’s Bathrooms”. While studying in China, she founded a grass-root organization for LGBT feminists. Once in the US, she became involved with CFC and helped organize a variety of activities in support of the #MeTooInChina movement. She has an LLM from Fordham University.
Satpreet Kahlon is a multidisciplinary artist who is interested in sculpture as it relates to spaces - the physical, emotional, systemic, and institutional. Based out of Seattle, WA and Providence, RI, she is currently desperately counting down the days until she graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received a full-fellowship to pursue her MFA in Sculpture.
Sanchita Khurana combines interests in visual art, Cultural Studies, and urban space into her interdisciplinary doctoral research. She is currently a Fulbright Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society of Columbia University. Through the fellowship, she is exploring the synergies and variations between patterns of art-led gentrification in American neighbourhoods and areas in Delhi. By examining various(ly) gentrified areas, she intends to understand the specific ways in which urban art transforms different spaces. Through this she hopes to enable not just a comparative analysis between trajectories of urban (and) aesthetic cultures across cities in U.S.A and India, but also a re-evaluation of comparative paradigms in analyzing such patterns across contexts. The project takes a revisionist approach towards urban theory in the global South and through a relative study of the relationship between urban policy, urban art, and urban regeneration, attempts to go beyond simplistic analyses of globalization as Americanization.
Ama Konadu, LMSW, is a full-time Racial Equity Consultant and Facilitator—providing management and organizational change consultation to schools, organizations, and companies.
Clynton Lowry is an artist and a writer, as well as the founder and editor-in-chief of Art Handler magazine, and founder of jobs.art.
Natalia Nakazawa is a NYC-based artist, educator, and arts administrator. She is currently the Assistant Director of EFA Studios, a program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, an adjunct lecturer at the City College of New York, an artist in residence at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, and an active member of Admin.
New York City Action Medical are volunteer street medics active in New York City. They provide first aid and emergency care at protests, direct actions, and other sites of resistance and struggle]. We train other street medics and community members. Our group contains volunteers with many levels of certification and from many scopes of practice (EMTs, nurses, Wilderness first aid, herbalists, etc) but all are 20 hour medic trained. They acknowledge and respect the work of volunteer medics in struggles worldwide who have come before us and whose knowledge is the foundation for our current practices. Follow NYCAM on Facebook.
Oluremi Onabanjo is the former Director of Exhibitions and Collections for The Walther Collection, where she organized exhibitions in Europe, North America, and Africa. She co-curated Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography (2017), and edited its accompanying publication (Steidl, 2017), which was shortlisted for an ICP Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research (2018) and named “One of the Best Photo Books of 2017” by The New York Times. She lectures internationally on photography and curatorial practice, and during Spring 2019 is a Visiting Critic at the University of Pennsylvania’s MFA program. A PhD candidate in Art History at Columbia University, Onabanjo holds an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University, and a BA in African Studies from Columbia University.
Janelle Naomi Rouse has been an inner-city educator and arts enthusiast for ten years. Supporting grassroots organizations and nonprofit businesses, she enjoys finding ways to serve as a conduit between the work that she does in the classroom and the greater community at large to find ways to solve the problems that both spaces face on a day to day basis.
Winnie Shen is a communications officer for CFC as well as a community organizer at Housing Conservation Coordinators, a housing rights non-profit, where she organizes tenants and works on campaigns around strengthening the rent laws. Previously, she was a program assistant at China Labor Watch, a labor rights NGO based in NYC.
Milta Vega-Cardona is an Organizer and Core Trainer with the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond, providing Undoing Racism, workshops and technical assistance in Antiracist Organizing, leadership development, and Transformational Change. As part of the multi-racial, multi-cultural Leadership Team, Milta provides the guidance and supports the logistics in the antiracist organizing in the North East.
David X. Borgonjon is a curator and writer. He teaches curating and criticism at Rhode Island School of Design and is completing a PhD at Columbia University on racial economy in colonial Asia. He is a part of Admin
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From the 125th Street subway to International Affairs Building (420 W. 118th St) Entrance VIA STEPS. Head northwest on W 125th St./Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Blvd toward St. Nicholas Ave (495 feet). Turn left onto Morningside Ave (0.1 mi). Turn right onto W. 123rd St (0.2 mi). Turn left onto Amsterdam Ave (0.4 mi). Turn right onto W. 118th St (161 feet). Take the elevators to the 6th Floor and exit the building through the southern doors. The entrance to East Campus will be at the far left (southeastern) corner of the courtyard. Go up the stairs, check in with the guard, and proceed to the Heyman Center at the far end of the courtyard. Continue through to the second floor of the Heyman Center, accessible via elevator. Our primary meeting room is approximately 10 feet from the elevator door, to the left.
From the 116th Street and Broadway (1 train, M104, M60, M4 buses) to International Affairs Building (420 W. 118th St) Entrance VIA STEPS. Enter the main Columbia gates at 116th Street and Broadway (approximately 69 feet). Continue through to Amsterdam Avenue (0.2 miles), cross Amsterdam (266 feet). Turn right onto W 118th St (161 feet). Take the elevators to the 6th Floor and exit the building through the southern doors. The entrance to East Campus will be at the far left (southeastern) corner of the courtyard. Go up the stairs, check in with the guard, and proceed up using the elevator. After exiting the elevator, continue through to the second floor of the Heyman Center. Our primary meeting room is approximately 10 feet from the elevator door, to the left.
From the 116th Street and Broadway (1 train, M104, M60, M4 buses) to Wien Courtyard Entrance VIA ELEVATOR: Enter the main Columbia gates at 116th Street and Broadway (approximately 69 feet). Continue through to Amsterdam Avenue (0.2 miles), cross Amsterdam (266 feet). Turn left to enter the Wien Gates, continue through Wien Courtyard (223 ft) and take a right. The elevator will be on the left before the gate. Check in with the guard via mobile or buzzer system to access the elevator. (You may contact them at 212-854-2797). After exiting the elevator, continue through to the second floor of the Heyman Center. Our primary meeting room is approximately 10 feet from the elevator door, to the left.
From the 125th Street subway station to Wien Courtyard Entrance: On Amsterdam Avenue, take a left at 116th Street VIA ELEVATOR. Turn left to enter the Wien Gates, continue through Wien Courtyard (223 ft) and take a right. The elevator will be on the left before the gate. Check in with the guard via mobile or buzzer system to access the elevator. (You may contact them at 212-854-2797). After exiting the elevator, continue through to the second floor of the Heyman Center, accessible by elevator. Our primary meeting room is approximately 10 feet from the elevator door, to the left. assistance from Public Safety is required.
From the 125th Street subway to Wien Courtyard Entrance VIA STEPS: Head northwest on W 125th St./Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Blvd toward St. Nicholas Ave (495 feet). Turn left onto Morningside Ave (0.1 mi). Turn right onto W. 123rd St (0.2 mi). Turn left onto Amsterdam Ave (0.4 mi). Turn left onto W. 116th St (266 ft). Turn left again, enter the Wien Gates, continue past Wien Courtyard (223 ft) and Jerome Greene Annex will be on the right.
From the 116th Street and Broadway (1 train, M104, M60, M4 buses) to Wien Courtyard Entrance VIA STEPS: Enter the main Columbia gates at 116th Street and Broadway (approximately 69 feet). Continue through to Amsterdam Avenue (0.2 miles), cross Amsterdam (266 feet). Turn left to enter the Wien Gates, continue past Wien Courtyard (223 ft) and Jerome Greene Annex will be on the right. Our meeting room is on the ground floor of the Annex.
From the 116th Street and Broadway (1 train, M104, M60, M4 buses) to Wien Courtyard Entrance VIA ACCESS RAMP: Enter the main Columbia gates at 116th Street and Broadway (approximately 69 feet). Continue through to Amsterdam Avenue (0.2 miles), cross Amsterdam (266 feet). Turn left to enter the Wien Gates, continue through Wien Courtyard (223 ft) and Jerome Greene Annex will be on the right. The access ramp will be on the west side of the building north of Wien Hall, you may need to contact security to enter.
From the 116th Street and Broadway (1 train, M104, M60, M4 buses) to Wien Courtyard Entrance VIA ACCESS RAMP: Enter the main Columbia gates at 116th Street and Broadway (approximately 69 feet). Continue through to Amsterdam Avenue (0.2 miles), cross Amsterdam (266 feet). Turn left to enter the Wien Gates, continue through Wien Courtyard (223 ft) and Jerome Greene Annex will be on the right. The access ramp will be on the west side of the building north of Wien Hall, you may need to contact security to enter.
Anthropology
AfroCrowd
Art and Feminism
Arts and Sciences Graduate Council
Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture
Center for Contemporary Critical Thought
East Asian Languages and Cultures
English and Comparative Literature
French and Romance Phillology
Germanic Languages
Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies
Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Institute for African Studies
Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality
Slavic Languages
Weatherhead East Asian Institute