Joint Projects

Stathis Gourgouris.

“The Legacy of Bandung Humanisms” is an open-ended ongoing project of collaborative research, begun in 2014 and co-organized by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University and Global Critical Humanities of the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA, which revisits the legacy of international anti-colonial cooperation in politics and culture that was inaugurated by the Bandung Congress in 1955. The project is envisioned as a multiple-year series of events of various sorts—public conferences, smaller workshops, art exhibitions, joint publications – at the heart of which operates a working study group, composed of faculty and graduate students from a variety of disciplines with members in both campuses. The present proposal, which brings the project into the mandate of IRCPL, envisions furthering international collaboration with intellectuals and artists from regions directly affected by the Bandung legacy, which is meant to be conducted not only in the premises of Columbia University but expressly in local academic and public contexts.

Katherine Franke and Elizabeth Reiner Platt.

In 2018, the Law, Rights, and Religion Project published a report on the impact of religious policies at Catholic hospitals on access to sexual and reproductive health care. While the limits of Catholic care are increasingly well-documented, little has been published on access to comprehensive, non-discriminatory sexual and reproductive health care in non-Catholic, religiously-affiliated hospitals, including Baptist and Adventist facilities. This is in large part because, unlike Catholic hospitals, which are regulated by a central authority (the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops), other religiously-affiliated providers are not bound by an explicit, written set of religious guidelines. Thus, determining precisely how a facility’s religious identity impacts their institutional policies is a complex undertaking.

This pilot project seeks to investigate and raise awareness about the impacts of religiously-affiliated heath care providers in the U.S. South, both with respect to these institutions acting as employers and as health care providers. We seek to document the prevalence of faith-based health providers in several states including North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Georgia; their employment policies (e.g., employee health insurance exclusions, nondiscrimination policies); number of employees; public funding received; limits on care provided to the public; efforts to receive religious exemptions from legal requirements; and whether existing legal exemptions or other state policies limit access to care.