This summer, Incite Institute set out to award $300,000 in new grants through our Breakdown/(Re)generation Project, which supports Columbia University Arts and Sciences initiatives related to breakdowns in the social and natural worlds.

At present, seemingly stable systems are undergoing profound transformations: climate change disrupts longstanding ecological balances, political shifts challenge post-World War II norms, evolving perceptions of gender reshape identity formation, and epistemic shifts redefine how we learn and create knowledge. These disruptions allow us to reimagine and reconstruct systems, institutions, and norms to promote justice and equity in society. Our interest lies not only in understanding these breakdowns but also in exploring the possibilities of (re)generation that they bring about.

After an extensive search, we’re excited to introduce you to the 2024 Breakdown/(Re)generation grant recipients. Coming from disciplines including anthropology, earth science, and gender studies—and spanning from the Arctic Circle to Mexico—these projects and their leaders demonstrate remarkable potential to address and respond to breakdowns in innovative ways.

Art in the midst of cultural and ecological crisis

*The project team working with sound artist Alexander Rishaug in Sørfinnset skole as part of developing a SørfinnsetTV episode, supported in part by Incite. Photo by Caitlin Franzmann.*

With support from Incite, Denise Milstein (Sociology) is examining the work of artists responding to instances of ecological crisis and cultural erasure through care, research, experimentation, and the promotion of sustainable, diverse, and multi-species communities.

Two art projects, Ensayos and Sørfinnset skole/the nordland, model ways of building and working in community, producing and sharing knowledge, and mobilizing to address environmental challenges. At the center of this comparison is an examination of how relational art connects local and Indigenous communities with scientists, activists, and policymakers responding to the challenges of climate change.

Breakdown and (re)generation of racial justice movements

Colin Leach (Psychology and Africana Studies, Barnard College; Psychology and IRAAS, GSAS; Data Science Institute) is leading a multi-disciplinary team that works in a trans-disciplinary way to better understand how Black Lives Matter—the meme and the movement—moves people for, against, and away from racial justice in the U.S. and U.K.

The team, including Shaunette T. Ferguson (Psychology and Africana Studies, Barnard College; Data Science Institute) and Nikhi Anand (Psychology) is examining the unprecedented use of Black Lives Matter (labels and content) for online discussion of racial justice in the summer of 2020 (after the murder of George Floyd) in comparison to previous time periods.

A deeper understanding of the system dynamics of racial justice discussion in light of racialized killing, protest, and police and authority responses should begin to offer suggestions of how to intervene in the system to produce productive breakdowns and the (re)generation of genuine and shared concern and commitment to a common justice.

Breakdown and (re)generation of Arctic carbon

The Arctic is changing quickly, warming nearly 4x faster than at the equator, and these changes have significant implications not only for Arctic peoples and landscapes, but for all of humanity as we share a common atmosphere.

With support from Incite, Kevin Griffin and Ed Barry (Earth and Environmental Sciences; Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology) aim to create new knowledge and provide critical insights into the ecology of the Arctic and the massive amount of carbon stored there.

Peer exit and the breakdown/(re)generation of adolescent relations

With support from Incite, James Chu (Sociology) will investigate how the structure of adolescent friendship and homework-helping relationships changes in response to the departure of their peers, how these effects vary based on the circumstances of exit (e.g. the centrality of the departing member’s network position), and corresponding consequences of peer exit for the academic achievement and mental health of those who remain.

Chu’s goal is to elucidate how various kinds of peer exit break down adolescent friendship and academic support networks, the circumstances where peer exit enables regeneration of these networks, and how these patterns of exit-induced breakdown and regeneration in peer group structure affect adolescent welfare.

Making the X multiple: “Y the X?”

As a novel gender marker, the X represents a reaction to shifting norms surrounding what was previously a formal gender binary; through flattening a broad spectrum of genderqueer experiences into one isolated category, it reconstitutes the validity of the gender marker system and M/F as the standard.

Through a website that serves as part oral history and part art installation, Madisson Whitman (Center for Science and Society) and team (Eden Martin, Sociology; Kris Koh, Columbia College; Lloy Hack, History) intend to present the people behind the X in all their complexity, re/generating a spectrum of (gender)queer meanings while challenging gender markers’ essentialist meaning. As an analog means of dissemination that is conscious of the richness of queer tradition, the team will also publish a zine compilation of their interviews and art.

The promise and paradox of climate change litigation

In the context of the global climate change crisis and the growing recognition of the need to identify and pursue alternative, more sustainable, socio-economic activities and ways of being, this project will examine ambitious litigation pursued by South African Indigenous groups to oppose mining and protect their way of life.

Supported by Incite, Jackie Dugard (Institute for Study of Human Rights) will explore the motivations for, and modes including litigation of, resistance against destructive economic activity; and the contours and ramifications of the assertion of any alternative socio-economic paradigms, particularly those (such as decolonial eco-feminism) with the potential to counteract climate change through their (re)generative, sustainable character. In addition, struck by the injustice that communities that benefited the least from the dominant economic development model (and are most vulnerable to climactic fluctuations) are now on the frontline of climate transition efforts, the project aims to explore the socio-legal implications of this paradox.

To carry out this work, Dugard will collaborate with Wilmien Wicomb (attorney, Legal Resources Centre, South Africa) and the community in Baleni Village and Steenberg’s Cove in South Africa.

Rethinking recovery

The Rethinking Recovery Working Group conducts critical exploration of how the notion of “recovery” is deployed across domains of biomedicine, pandemic politics, climate change, economics, and other fields of governance. Employing the dual lenses of transformative justice and feminist/intersectional science and technology studies, the group pays close attention to the reciprocal relations between techno-scientific practices and knowledges, on the one hand, and multiple intersecting axes of power on the other.

The Group’s principal investigator is Samuel R. Roberts (History and Sociomedical Sciences) and is co-directed by Rebecca Jordan-Young and Elizabeth Bernstein (Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Barnard).

Introducing the 2024–2025 Breakdown/(Re)generation Grantees