“Beyond a Boundary: the Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Collective at NYU” is a three-year initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Building on Black feminist theorizations of intersectionality, the Collective functions as a forum for feminist/queer scholars, activists, and cultural workers throughout New York City and the Tri-State region. Our Collective focuses on how intersectional feminist/queer analysis reframes our understanding of disparate issues (from migration, to climate justice, to policing and surveillance), as they play out in the specificity of our regional location of New York City and the Tri-State area, even as we attend to their transnational and global dimensions. Rather than furthering a narrative of New York City’s exceptionalism, we focus on how the city becomes a microcosm for national and global dynamics and phenomena.
We borrow our title, “Beyond a Boundary,” from CLR James’ classic memoir on cricket and colonialism. James uses cricket as a prism through which to reflect on race, nationalism, class, masculinity, and empire. So too do we use New York City itself as a prism through which to think through the relation between race, gender, and sexuality in local and global contexts. Our title, “Beyond a Boundary,” references our Collective’s engagement with the disparate geographic and discursive terrains of New York City as a global and local site.
In addition, our title references our goal to move beyond multiple boundaries: between the university and the communities that surround us; between disciplines and institutions; between academics, artists, and community organizers.
The various activities sponsored by the Collective (focusing on pedagogy, research, and arts/activism) include graduate student dissertation workshops, team-taught classes with faculty partnering across departments and institutions, symposia and speaker series, and collaborations with artists and community-based organizations.
Many graduate students want to integrate intersectional analysis into their projects but do not know how, given that they have not received training in feminist/queer studies. The Collective will bring together six graduate students and four scholars from the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium (IUDC) over three days to workshop a dissertation chapter. The goal of the workshop is to enable students to amplify the intersectional feminist/queer stakes of their research through guidance from top scholars in the field.
The Black Rest Project is a three-year initiative by the Center for Black Visual Culture at NYU involving scholars, cultural workers, artists, and community organizations. The BRP seeks to curate, excavate, and amplify visual narratives of Black rest and leisure. The Intersectional Queer/Feminist Studies Collective at NYU will partner with the BRP to re-evaluate questions of rest, self-care, and labor as they play out across the differently racialized and gendered constituencies we engage through the Collective: Black, Asian, immigrant, diasporic,
indigenous, Latinx.
Felipe Baeza (b. 1987, Guanajuato, Mexico) is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union and an M.F.A. from Yale University.
Shahzia Sikander is a Pakistani-American visual artist. Sikander works across a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, printmaking, animation, installation, performance and video. Sikander currently lives and works in New York City.
Gayatri Gopinath
Principal Investigator
María Josefina Saldaña Portillo
Co-Organizer
Jacqueline Nassy Brown
Co-Organizer
Dr. Joan Morgan
Co-Organizer
Kandice Chuh, Graduate Center, CUNY
Lou Cornum, New York University
Aimee Meredith Cox, New York University
Carlos Decena, Rutgers
Lisa Duggan, New York University
Licia Fiol-Matta, New York University
Laura Harris, New York University
Feng-Mei Heberer, New York University
Maya Mikdashi, Rutgers
Manijeh Moradian, Barnard College
Jennifer Morgan, New York University
Ann Morning, New York University
Rupal Oza, Hunter College, CUNY
Crystal Parikh, New York University
Sonali Perera, Hunger College, CUNY
Whit Pow, New York University
Ella Shohat, New York University
Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Barnard College/Columbia University
E.K. Tan, Stony Brook University
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