Resources on Campus: BCRW
As a tour guide, I often get asked what it means to attend a historically women’s college, and how this influences life at Barnard. While many assume that only women can apply for and attend Barnard, our identity as a historically women’s college is much more than that. Any student who identifies as a gender minority can apply to and attend Barnard. I wouldn’t describe our identity as a historically women’s college as a part of the admissions process, but instead as something that shapes the resources, support services, and community discussions of gender and “womanhood” on campus.
One of these resources, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, is especially important not only in providing research opportunities and support to students and faculty but also in facilitating discussions across campus regarding gender and its intersections with race, sexuality, and other identities. The Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) “brings scholars and activists together through its working groups, public events, publications, and multimedia projects to advance intersectional social justice feminist analyses and to promote social transformation.” Since it was founded in 1971, the BCRW has collaborated with community organizations, academics, activists, and cultural workers in New York City, across the United States, and transnationally, hosting events and creating projects to encourage these mutually beneficial relationships. The BCRW hosts the annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, a peer-reviewed journal S&F Online, a collection of feminist social movement archives located at Barnard College, and the recently inaugurated Social Justice Initiative, all of which are available for exploring on their website. They are constantly expanding to include more and more virtual resources and events, ensuring that all students, academics, and activists have access to the materials they need for their research and work — especially during the COVID era.
The BCRW is a collaborative effort and its work is directed and guided by numerous activists, academics, and researchers. You can see many of their profiles here. Their expertise range from neoliberalism to transnationalism to religion and gender to abolition. The current interim director, Professor Elizabeth Castelli, focuses her academic research on religious studies. She’s particularly interested in the “afterlives” of biblical and early Christian texts, and how these sources are cited and referred to in contemporary social, political, and cultural expressions and medias. Tami Navarro, the current Associate Director, holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University and specializes in Neoliberalism, Capital, Gender and Labor, Development, Identity Formation, Globalization/Transnationalism, Race/Racialization and Ethnicity, and Caribbean Studies. She’s currently working on a manuscript titled Virgin Capital: Financial Services as Development in the US Virgin Islands, which explores the ways in which neoliberal initiatives that advocate the freeing of markets and greater globalization ultimately lead to the entrenchment of existing processes of racialization. The manuscript traces not only globalized capital but also the ways in which it is rooted in historical intersections of race, gender, and geopolitical positioning.
All in all, the BCRW is a great resource for students interested in further exploring gender and its intersections. Barnard students can join working groups (including attending events for the current Poverty and Housing Working Group), participate in Critical Inquiry Labs (interdisciplinary courses at Barnard College designed to foster in-depth critical studies of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nation, and citizenship), and serve as research assistants, where they’re paid to conduct research and prepare programs for the BCRW. All prospective and current students should certainly check out their website to learn more about current event offerings and opportunities, but could also consider visiting their office on campus, located on the 6th floor of the Milstein Center. (Obviously, this option isn’t available just yet, but usually their office is a great place to learn more, and even get guidance on Barnard’s archive selections and projects.) The BCRW is a wonderful resource for anyone looking to question and contemplate gender and all of its intersections, and their archives and research materials prove extraordinarily helpful to any student interested in exploring gender for their thesis work or even essays and research in general!
-Maya Corral