IN COLLABORATION: International Conference: "Injured Cities, Urban Afterlives"

October 14-15, 2011
Columbia University

Please visit the conference website (socialdifference.org/injuredcities) for schedule and registration details (registration required; no registration fee).

Sponsored by the Engendering Archives Project of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference and co-sponsored by the School of the Arts, this conference is convened on the tenth anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001. In a series of presentations and conversations, an international group of artists, writers, activists and individuals directly affected by urban injury will imagine creative modes of reinvention in response to urban disaster. Together the participants ask: What are the effects of catastrophe on cities, their inhabitants, and the larger world? How can we address the politics of terror with which states react to their vulnerability? What enduring wounds does catastrophe leave on urban life, and how can they be mobilized and transformed in the aftermath of injury to enable the imagination of new modes of social life and to thwart impending forms of social death? Participants include:
 
Ariella Azoulay
Nina Bernstein
Teddy Cruz
Ann Jones
Dinh Q. Lê
Anne McClintock
Shirin Neshat
Walid Ra’ad
Saskia Sassen
Karen Till
Clive van den Berg
Eyal Weizman
Narrators from the 9/11 Oral History Project
 
The conference will also feature a lecture-performance by Mapa Teatro from Bogota, Colombia entitled "Testimony to the Ruins" on Friday evening, October 14, as well as a coordinated exhibition, "Encounters in the Aftermath: Works by Lorie Novak," which will be open throughout and over the week following the conference.
 
Moderators include School of the Arts Dean Carol Becker, Gerry Albarelli, Hazel V. Carby, Mary Marshall Clark, Saidiya Hartman, Rosalind Morris, Diana Taylor, and Mabel Wilson. Tina Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, and Laura Wexler are co-organizers of the conference.
 
The conference is sponsored by The Columbia University Engendering Archives Project of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. It is co-sponsored by the Columbia University President's Office; Columbia University School of the Arts; Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy; Oral History Research Office; Friends of Columbia University Libraries; Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation; Society of Fellows, Dart Center; Institute for Research on Women and Gender; Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life; Barnard Center for Research on Women; Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics; and Yale University Public Humanities Program.