5:00pm – 5:30pm
19th to 20th April 2018
Columbia University

Frontiers of Debt in the Caribbean and Afro-America brings together scholars, journalists, activists, and artists from across these two regions in order to interrogate their contemporary re-emergence as sites of new forms of capital extraction and opposition to debt regimes. The two-day event is comprised of an art exhibit and a conference.

The art exhibit, entitled Puerto Rico Under Water: Five Artist Perspectives on Debt will be housed in the Gallery at the Columbia University Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (420 Hamilton Hall) and will open with a reception at 5pm on April 19.

The conference itself will take place between 10am and 5:30pm on April 20 at the Columbia University Law School (Jerome Green Building, Room 102).

The conference will consist of three panels, in addition to opening remarks by the organizers and a keynote address by Sir Hilary Beckles. The first panel is organized around the theme of “Indebted Bodies” and addresses questions of race, class, gender, and other forms of hierarchical difference, with a general focus on how different kinds of debt are folded into relations of intimacy, kinship, and everyday interactions. The afternoon panels include “Debts’ Toxins,” which is focused on the relationship of indebtedness and the environment, and “Beyond Life and Debt: Education at the Crossroads,” which examines the emergence of debates and mobilizations around education, information, and communication in the context of debt crisis.

This event is presented by the Center for the Study of Social Difference, with support from Barnard Center for Research on Women, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Institute of Latin American Studies, Institute for Research on African-American Studies, the Society of Fellows-Heyman Center for the Humanities, Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law.

Above images and text adapted from email.