Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference - Incite at Columbia University

The Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) is an interdisciplinary research center supporting collaborative working groups that address gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of inequality to foster ethical and progressive social change.

CSSD was founded in 2015 and joined Incite Institute in 2025. Through several working groups, CSSD brings Columbia Arts and Sciences faculty into conversation with with scholars, artists, writers, and policymakers in the US and abroad.

Why Study Social Difference?

We live in a world where social differences—gender, wealth, race, ability, geography—have been made to matter. Differences undergird inequalities, local and global. They limit cultural horizons.

How are social differences created and institutionalized? How has science grounded or undermined such differences? How do liberal democracies founded on principles of equality tolerate profound injustice? The discrete categories by which we identify people have proven inadequate to understanding the complexities of power in our world. It is urgent that we understand the mutually constituted categories of difference that shape our social world and their cultural and economic impacts.

CSSD's 2026-2027 theme: Renaissance

Renaissance is an opening for reassessment and rebirth that such commemorative anniversaries present. Our engagement with renaissance does not entail a wish for a return to some nostalgically glorified time; instead, it is based on a continuous potential for rebirth. Such rebirths require not an eschewing of the past or its replication, but a serious, critical, and future-minded engagement with its mixed legacies. Which aspects of inherited pasts require caretaking and reinvigoration, and which require abandonment in order to move forward - to be reborn? What methods of remembrance and reckoning with the past’s legacies move us beyond coercive nostalgia or obscuring histories?