Nai: New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE)

International Women’s Strike Interview Project

In this project, IWS-NYC members perform interviews with women organizers from worker centers and cooperatives, as part of a process of militant knowledge co-production. We are particularly interested in unpacking the conditions that both enable and limit autonomous labor organizing and self-determination, as well as the way in which feminist ...
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Nai: New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE)

When Sexism Became a Word

1968 and Feminism

A year can only be a snapshot, an image at best partial and at worse distorting of the complex messiness of life. For me, 1968 is indubitably a very important year. I was born in September of that year and have lived my whole life with the lingering question of ...
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When Sexism Became a Word

Is Equality Enough?

Black feminist views of justice

Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section ...
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Is Equality Enough?

Blackness, Gender, and the Non-normative

A Response to Christopher Lebron’s The Making of Black Lives Matter

Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section ...
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Blackness, Gender, and the Non-normative

Multiple and Interlocking

Black Lives Matter as the lens through which a system is made clear

Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section ...
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Multiple and Interlocking

Position of the Helsinki Committee in Poland

An open letter

In the opinion of the Helsinki Committee in Poland, the two years since November 2015 have brought the greatest number of challenges and threats to human rights and freedoms of the entire post-1989 period. The Committee, as a civic initiative monitoring the violation of rights and fundamental freedoms since 1983, examines ...
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Position of the Helsinki Committee in Poland

Social Organicism in the Service of Power

The sinister side of unity discourse

Socialists, social democrats, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and even liberals like Barack Obama, have been condemned for promoting “class warfare.” However, condemning those who combat oppression and injustice for “dividing society” is to participate in the defense of the social order as it currently exists. Such condemnations of attempts at ...
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Social Organicism in the Service of Power

Millions March Throughout Country on Inauguration Anniversary

Hundreds of thousands in New York City

  It was called a Women’s March, and it took place on the first anniversary of the massive women’s march on Washington after Trump’s inauguration. But women and women’s rights were only one of several themes. The most prevalent theme was opposition to everything Trump has done and said, before and ...
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Millions March Throughout Country on Inauguration Anniversary

The Long Shadow

The legacy of the Moynihan Report and the limits of postwar liberalism

In Rochester NY, where I live, a recent poverty initiative has been proposed to address some of the most deeply entrenched poverty areas of this country. History casts its long shadow over the understanding of poverty evinced by these initiatives. Short on proposals to empower the community, the reading lists ...
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The Long Shadow

How the “Pussyhat” Became a Feminist Fashion Icon

Feminists have long had a fraught relationship with fashion. But the pussyhat looks set to change that.

Almost a year ago, a day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, hundreds and thousands of women gathered in Washington D.C. to protest the president’s policies towards women, LGBTQ, Muslims, immigrants and other minorities. The world looked on with awe at the sea of pink that formed on the Great Lawn; in ...
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How the “Pussyhat” Became a Feminist Fashion Icon

The Many Faces of the #MeToo Backlash

From Weinstein to The New School: Push back against sexual harassment allegations is gathering steam

For every allegation of sexual assault or harassment there seems to be both a wave of solidarity and also a backlash. The #MeToo campaign, which garnered 1.7 million tweets in 86 countries by October 24, 2017 just nine days after actress Alyssa Milano kick started it in response to allegations of sexual ...
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The Many Faces of the #MeToo Backlash

Toward a Feminist Definition of Feminism

A historical exploration of the word, ‘Feminism’

Recently, Merriam-Webster announced that its “Word of the Year” -- the most looked-up word in 2017 -- was feminism. Use of the word spiked nearly 70% this year, especially in the wake of the Women’s March. Look-ups of the word also spiked after Kellyanne Conway claimed that she was not a feminist ...
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Toward a Feminist Definition of Feminism