Mission
At Beyond Identity, our mission is to build solidarities between City College’s queer and women-identified student scholar-activists on campus, and with political organizers and prominent scholars off campus to collectively challenge the violence that impacts marginalized communities.
Who we are
The Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative, The Office of the President at the City College of New York, and The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership has collaborated on this new campus-wide initiative. The program trains young women of color and queer students from both immigrant and U.S.-based minority communities in identity-driven research, allowing them to draw on lived experiences of discrimination and violence to inform the research agendas and political writing that will be the foundation of distinctive political projects.
*The category “women” is inclusive of transgender, cis-gender, and non-binary forms of gendered identities. The Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative does not discriminate on gender or race. All programs are open to all eligible participants without regard to race, gender, national origin, or other characteristics protected by law.
This Moment
As the nation as a whole moves towards political polarization, fissures within activist movements are particularly worrying and are increasingly found in organizing centered around narrow understandings of identity. Young women of color on our campus struggle to navigate speaking to universal struggles of women of color, while holding onto important perspectives born of specific identities and experiences.
The intensity of information flowing through social media situates our students within conflicts abroad that are, in fact, transnational – their virtual political reality is also increasingly divisive, creating false lines between young women of color activists.
A South Asian Muslim woman on campus takes on a leadership role in the movement of her generation, Black Lives Matter. She often draws the importance of racial justice work back to her Sikh, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi immigrant community. After moments of violence in the U.S., now combined with a rise in xenophobia, shape the everyday racism she faces, she looks for a reciprocal solidarity from American-born women of color.
How do we create a space for women of color to draw on their lived experiences to move beyond the politics of identity to build stronger political movements, creating solidarity through political through lines?
Program Goals
The growing demand from policymakers for “data” on issues such as radicalization, identity, violence and protest makes the question of who does the research increasingly urgent. At the heart of the BI program is the idea that those with direct experience of oppression produce uniquely relevant insights on these subjects. We suggest that centering the voices of marginalized women also allows us to re-frame important questions and approaches to research, moving away, for instance, from paradigms that separate “western” analyses from “local” knowledge. In a time of increasing political polarization, the Beyond Identity Program aims to inform deeper political ties and to arm vulnerable populations of women with the research and writing skills to challenge multiple sites of repression.
Situating the Project at City College
“We are a campus of immigrants, and the advocacy for justice in the field of immigration will continue to be central to our educational efforts. We are a campus community that proclaims its diversity, and so must be a refuge and a source of wisdom on questions of racial, religious, and gender fairness”
-City College President, Vincent Boudreau (November 9, 2016)
The work of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative at the Colin Powell School in the past four years has cultivated conversations that complicate conversations on gender and violence, through courses, guided research, lectures, writing workshops, and unique panel discussions. It has become a space for young women of color on campus to reflect, organize, and challenge patriarchy inside, and outside, their movements.
This perspective is encouraged by the founding mission of the school, that in part seeks to turn the unique perspectives and experiences of our students—a body unmatched in the diversity of its experience (in 2015, 7,131 out of 8,636 students for whom we have data came from outside the U.S.) into a source of expertise, and a perspective that is vastly underrepresented in policy conversations that directly affect these same students.
Moreover, the school’s embrace of a pedagogy of engagement (the school has pioneered programs like the Engaged Scholarship Program, Movement-Building Thursdays, and the first interdisciplinary minor in Community Organizing) to promote the dissemination of these experiences, perspectives and expertise of our students in applied and useful ways to public audiences.
In the current moment, City College has affirmed itself as a place that serves the interests of, and will help protect, the whole people. The College has begun to devote extraordinary resources towards insuring the physical and mental security of students on campus, and to mobilize its political and intellectual resources to defend the vision of a diverse and secure population against whatever threats current or future political arrangements may present. We have committed ourselves to defending CCNY’s right and obligation to be a sanctuary for those endeavoring to make their way in American society, particularly when they come from populations who have in some way been marginalized from the social, political or economic mainstream.