Courses and Concepts
On the BI program, students will learn to develop their own research agendas based on the intersections between personal experience, activist struggles in the U.S., and broader academic debates. By pulling together individual research, the analyses of these young women will begin to inform a sustained critique of dominant approaches to gender, violence and the politics of resistance.
A central element of the program is an effort to equip young activists with the tools they need to develop and communicate their ideas. As well as courses on themes such as gender, violence, immigration, protest, social movements and diaspora studies, the program will involve a number of core components:
Intensive writing workshops will push each student to craft nonfiction narratives into compelling forms of political communication.
Policy presentations in New York and D.C. will help locate insights missing in contemporary policy dialogues and bring to life potential areas for research.
Field research will be conducted over the summer, as well as internships with activist organizations in New York City.
Movement building workshops hosted by activist movements from around the world will train students to take on larger collective action projects.
A regular lecture series of women of color engaged in political work drawn from their own research will be held in partnership with other campus movements.
An annual presentation will allow students to present their research and enter into conversation with policy makers, activists and writers.
LIVING A FEMINIST LIFE/WRITING A FEMINIST STORY
DR. ANJULI KOLB
Living a Feminist Life/Writing a Feminist Story invites students to consider the range of ways in which knowledge about women’s lives has been constructed in text, and how this knowledge has historically functioned with regard to the choices women have and make. The first half of the course is organized around reading and studying philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and fiction by and about women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the second half of the course, students will produce living protocols and creative documentation of feminist life and life writing.
*The syllabi linked below is the intellectual property of Dr. Anjuli Kolb and if used must be cited as such.
THE FEMALE FIGHTER: UNDERSTANDING GENDER AND VIOLENCE
DR. NIMMI GOWRINATHAN
This seminar is designed to produce critical thinking and analytical writing on the intersections of Gender & Violence. The increased presence of women in groups like the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) and the Islamic State, as well as the expanded role of women in the United States military raises new questions about women’s political agency, both on, and off, the battlefield.
While more traditional narratives, and subsequent humanitarian interventions, often frame women as peace builders, the historic positioning of women of women within militant groups challenges both existing theories of radicalization, along with the gendered assumptions that inform them. The goal of this course is to provide a deeper, more analytical, understanding of the lived experience of women as their lives intersect with violence in multiple ways. Among other subjects, the course will cover theories on the formation of women’s political identities, the politics of sexual violence, the role of humanitarian intervention, and the complicated agency of women within repressive contexts. The readings are drawn from relevant academic disciplines, but include nonfiction narrative literature and policy-oriented analysis in order to situate each debate in multiple spheres of influence.
*The syllabi linked below is the intellectual property of Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan and if used must be cited as such.
NON-FICTION PUBLISHING
MICHEAL ARCHER
This workshop is designed to equip students with the tools they need to craft nonfiction writing (memoir, reportage, personal essays, polemics) that effectively conveys their ideas and experiences to the world. The readings will include nonfiction books and articles written by women of color, from the US and abroad, who have drawn on their background experiences (as victims and agents) to make strong, relevant insights and commentary on violence, identity, immigration, radicalization, and protest. The goal is to provide a deep understanding of how to best write about (through genre, structure, voice) the students’ lived experiences.
*The syllabi linked below is the intellectual property of Micheal Archer and if used must be cited as such.
GUERRILLA FEMINISM & WAR BY COUNTER NARRATIVES
RAFIA ZAKARIA,J.D.
The constrictions imposed by whiteness on ideas of women and women’s empowerment are by now routine subjects of critique and discussion. There is however little effort in pedagogy to place the “other” woman at the center of discussions of empowerment and develop subversive counter narratives that intentionally dislocate whiteness. I envision this course as an exercise in
just this sort of activist feminist inversion; one that centers on critiquing the omniscience of white feminist voices and developing individual narratives that counter them. Divided into four or five components, course discussions will focus on how white women's’ voices dominate discussions of a) war reporting b) travel c) illness d) sexual awakening e) human rights and f) work.
*The syllabi linked below is the intellectual property of Dr. Rafia Zakaria and if used must be cited as such.
THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF SPACE
DR. VALERIA LUISELLI
At its best, creative work draws on personal experience to attempt something larger –not out of any kind of intellectual vanity or pretension, but out of a combination of frank self-exposure and commitment to a constant inquiry into our social and political experience. During this course, we will be working on a series of creative-critical pieces, based on specific prompts. These prompts will seek to connect us to the physical spaces we inhabit as members of a community, the political spaces that our personal political agendas bind us to, and the interior spaces we inhabit, where we play out our everyday battles with memory, desire and imagination.
*The syllabi linked below is the intellectual property of Dr. Valeria Luiselli and if used must be cited as such.
WOMEN OF COLOR AND WRITING
RETHA POWERS
This course will touch base with second year BI students, as well as other CCNY students, as they further their skills on writing personal narratives with a political twist. During the semester they will work with Retha Powers on the problematic position of being a woman of color in the literary world. Students will delve into the technical aspects of writing, as well as the less articulated difficulties of dealing with overly-scrutinized voices and issues of identity, gender, race and the intersections of such elements.
*The syllabi linked below is the intellectual property of Retha Powers and if used must be cited as such.
ORDER IN THE COURTROOM: LAW AND NARRATIVE POWER
FATHIMA CADER, J.D.
They took him to the airport three times before they were able to deport him. Each time the airline refused to let him on the airplane because he was handcuffed and it would have been disturbing for the passengers to see him that way. On June 17, 2000 he was put on the airplane where no one could see him. His handcuffs were left on.
The above is an excerpt by from the Canadian immigration law decision, Ramirez v. Canada, 2004 CanLII 69374, as written by adjudicator Shirley Collins.
Whose story is Adjudicator Collins telling here? Would Samuel Jonathan Ramirez Perez, the detainee, tell the story different? How about the passengers? The pilot? If this were enacted as play or film, who would play the part of Canada?
"Narrative is radical," said Toni Morrison when accepting her Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, "creating us at the very moment it is being created."
Three years later, James Baldwin wrote: “The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer.”
Courtrooms are often portrayed as uniquely powerful places for disenfranchised individuals and peoples to “tell their story.” In this course, we will consider how law, legal venues, and legal workers are represented in literary and cultural texts. We will also examine how we can read critical and literary theory into legal analysis. This course aims to further a social justice politic by helping us think through the law, to see both the stories it tells and the stories it hides.
*The syllabi linked below is the intellectual property of Fathima Cader and if used must be cited as such.
WITCHES AND BRUJAS: EXHUMING THE VOICES AND HISTORIES OF AFRICAN-BASED RELIGIONS
DR. SHERIDEN BOOKER
In 2016, Puerto Rican rapper and Santeria priestess Princess Nokia (Destiny Frasqueri) released the song “Brujas” capturing the spirit of a generation looking to exalt and reclaim the historically maligned spiritual legacies of African and indigenous women. Drawing on anthropology of religion texts as well as historical examples--ranging from Tituba, the enslaved Native American women targeted in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the Code Noir 1685 (Haiti) and1724 (Louisiana) to the witch-hunts and yellow press in post-independence Cuba, the 1993 U.S. Supreme Court Case Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v City of Hialeah, Florida, and Beyonce's Lemonade--this course will look at the ways African-based spiritual systems has been apprehended, criminalized, legalized, and re-legitimized within the context of modernity, nation building, contemporary racial formations, and pop culture movements.We will explore how these processes have particularly impacted notions of feminine agency and gender roles within marginalized religious communities. Students will gain an introduction to various African-based religions including but not limited to Santeria, Vodou, Candomble, and Kumina, and to the extent time allows, allied indigenous-based religions such as Curanderismo.
*The syllabi linked below is the intellectual property of Dr. Sheriden Booker and if used must be cited as such.