Open Rapporteur Positions

These are in-person positions.

Rapporteurs serve as liaisons between the seminar and the department of The University Seminars, performing all duties necessary to ensure that meetings are successfully held. Seminars generally meet once a month during the evening. This position takes approximately 8-10 hours a month and rapporteurs are compensated $25.00/hour in their first and second years, and $30 in their third and subsequent years. Full-time Columbia University graduate students are eligible for this posting. Normally, students are not invited to attend seminars, which features distinguished speakers on contemporary issues and lively discussion by individuals with a special interest in the respective subject matter. Rapporteurs are expected to take notes on the meeting, help The Seminars office with organizational details, and to prepare notes for publication on The Seminars website and for use by attendees.

NOTE: Applicants must make sure to take into account hourly commitments to teaching fellowships, DRA and/or RA, TA positions.

Full time Columbia University students may not work more than 20 hours per week for any on-campus employment, and university and academic holidays must be observed. If you are interested in one of the positions listed below, contact the respective seminar chair/s.

737 | Narrative, Health, and Social Justice

This interdisciplinary and inter-institutional seminar explores the connection between narrative, health, and social justice. If disease, violence, terror, war, poverty, and oppression all manifest themselves in narrative, then it is equally true that resistance, justice, healing, activism, and collectivity can be products of a narrative-based approach to ourselves and the world. Narrative understanding helps unpack the complex power relations from the macro level between the resource rich and resource deprived, global allies and global antagonists, state and worker, disabled body and able-body, bread-earner and child-bearer, subject and researcher, patient and provider, as well as to the individual level of self and the other. The seminar will draw from such fields as journalism, performance arts, law, public health, trauma studies, anthropology, sociology, literary studies, medicine, writing, and cultural studies. The common thread will be the narratives we tell as individuals, families, communities, and nations that situate our experience in social, political, and cultural contexts, and that express in so many ways our search for justice in our world and for our world. Our aim is to broaden the mandate of each of our disciplines, challenging each of us to bring a critical, self-reflective eye to our scholarship, teaching, practice, and organizing through discussion, dialogue, interview, art making, introspection, and collaboration. As we explore concepts and lived experiences of privilege, power, access, vulnerability, and otherness, we expand our shared understanding of the intertwined realities of health, narrative, and social justice. How are the stories we tell manifestations of social injustice? How can we transform such stories into narratives of justice, health, and change to empower new voices and strategies to emerge as means towards advocacy and engagement?

Chair/s

Mario de la Cruz
md2998@columbia.edu

 

Zahra Khan
zhk2107@columbia.edu