ACTIVISM BEYOND THE CLASSROOM
PUBLIC NOTEBOOK

Working Syllabus

www.activismbeyondtheclassroom.com

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THEORIZING THE PRESENT

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Highlights from the Readings

J. Jack Halberstam (2005): “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies”

“The constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expand the potential of the moment...and squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand” (p.2) KS

“If we destabilize the meaning of capitalism using poststructuralist critiques of identity and signification, then we can begin to see the multiplicity of noncapitalst forms that constitute, supplement, and abridge global capitalism, but we can also begin to imagine, by beginning to see, the alternatives to capitalism that already exist and are presently under construction.” (p. 10) RH

“For the purpose of this book, ‘queer’ refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time. ‘Queer time’ is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaes the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. ‘Queer space’ refes to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describe the new understandigns of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics” (p. 6). KS

Rasheedah Philips (2016): “Future”

“Jeremey Rifkin explains that the use of linear progress narratives among oppressed peoples keeps them ‘confined in a narrow temporal band, unable to anticipate and plan for their own future...powerless to affect their political fate.” For those deprived of access to the future, they become stuck planning for the present while the society around them speeds forward in illusory, linear progress. The future thus becomes ‘untrustworthy [and] unpredictable.”” (p. 172). KS

“Along with Afrofuturism, a number of alternative movements have emerged over the past few years (e.g., Chicano futurism, Queer futurism, and Crip futurity) to appropriate or redefine notions of ‘future’ while actively exploring what the future might look like for marginalized people” (p. 173). KS

“Future shock” by Alvin Toffler. CVZ

Colonial time makes liberation something linear and controlled by those who control their time, general time, and the terms of their oppression. It creates a situation where there is no way to know what their future looks like and (especially in terms of wealth), to deprive people of their hope. CVZ

Presentism: ahistorical modern values placed on past (or future) events

Mark Rifkin (2017): “Indigenous Orientations”

“U.S. settler colonialism produces its own temporal formation, with its own particular ways of apprehending time, and the state’s policies, mappings, and imperatives generate the frame of reference...More than just affecting ideologies or discourses of time, that network of institutionalized authority over ‘domestic’ territory also powerfully shapes the possibilities for interaction, development and regularity within it. Such imposition can be understood as the denial of Indigenous temporal sovereignty, in the sense that one vision or way of experiencing time is cast as the only temporal formation--as the baseline for the unfolding of time itself” (p. 2) KS

“What does it mean to consider Native temporalities as having their own flow--as coherent yet changing, affected by other flows but not the same as them? In this way, Beyond Settler Time explores how Native peoples’ varied experiences of duration can remain nonidentical with respect to the dynamics of settler temporal formations, indicating ways of being-in-time that are not reducible to participation in a singular, given time--a unitary flow--largely contoured by non-native patterns and priorities” (p. 3).

“What possibilities are there for temporal multiplicity under the conditions of settler dominance?” (p. 16). KS

Colonial time makes “an ‘advancing people’ and a ‘static people,’ locating the latter out of time.” (p. 5). [how concepts of “authenticity” force performance instead of allowing growth and change]. CVZ

Veena Das’ idea of “the signature of the state.” CVZ

John Clarke (2010): “Of crises and conjunctures”

“Turning to the current conjuncture might require us to think about the different temporalities (the histories, trajectories and rhythms) that come to combine in the present...we need to think of the conjuncture as a point where different temporalities--and more specifically, the tensions, antagonisms and contradictions which they carry--begin to come together” (p. 342). KS

“I have tried to argue the importance of thinking conjuncturally, examining the heterogeneity of the present rather than tre1ating it in epochal terms (of either continuity or rupture). I have also tried to show that the question of how many crises, in what sort of articulation, might be more productive than a concern with the single and a singular view of crisis” (p. 352). KS

Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin (2015): “Displacing Neoliberalism”

“Conjunctural analysis is also partly about periodisation...Yet it is a periodisation of society as a whole that takes its shape out of the interweaving of different elements (social, cultural, economic), which often individually have different temporalities...These longer, differentiated, and intersecting temporalities and spatialities are crucial to understanding the character and dynamics of the current conjunctural moment” (p. 199-200). KS

“The argument we are making...is that a politics which seeks at least to contain capitalism within a limited, accountable and democratic space needs to have many dimensions, some of which may not seem recognisably political in the usual senses of that term. There are, as Deleuze and Guattari have put it in their different idiom, ‘a thousand plateaus,’ that is to say an almost infinite number of sites of multiple intersection within which a society’s future can be imagined, fought over, and determined… The challenge...is to develop ways of thinking and feeling which can bring about connections between different kinds of action, and identification between those engaged in them” (p. 220). KS

“The main mechanisms of exploitation and of appropriation of surplus are no longer so clearly located in relations between capital on the one hand and workers on the other. [...] This means that the locations of expropriation have multiplied, often to places that are less transparent and less easily contestable than the places of production to which we are accustomed. [...] Moreover, Other lines of social division are also important to the structuring of the current moment. Lines of division around gender/sexuality and race/ethnicity, for instance, structure social relations in distinctive ways. [...] When these social divisions operate within a capitalist system, they are, of course, profoundly shaped by it and articulated to it. But they retain their “relative autonomy.” p. 210 RH

“There are, as Deleuze and Guattari have put it in their different idiom, ‘a thousand plateaus’, that is to say an almost infinite number of sites of multiple intersections within which a society’s future can be imagined, fought over, and determined. Indeed in a good society there would be many co-existing and contending forms of power, and not exclusively those of property and capital on the one hand, nor of governments and political organisations on the other. The challenge, after these years of neoliberal ascendancy, is to develop ways of thinking and feeling which can bring about connections between different kinds of action, and identifications between those engaged in them. [...] The task is to create and sustain a new consensus around such values, which elected governments would over time find the confidence to give force to through their decisions.” pp. 220 RH

Neoliberalism “is nothing if not a new sexual settlement” (p. 212). CVZ

The 1619 Project

Jamelle Bouie: “American democracy has never shed the undemocratic assumption present at its founding: that some people are inherently entitled to more power than others” (p. 50). KS

Crispus Attucks (first person to die in the American Revolution and was a black man). Robert Hemings (Jefferson’s half-brother kept in slavery by Jefferson). Isaac Woodard (a veteran beaten blind by police 4.5 hours after being discharged). Phillis Wheatley (first African American to publish a book of poetry in the US). Gabriel Prosser (lead a slave rebellion and wanted to make an independent black state in Virginia). CVZ

Drapetomania--the “disease of the mind” that doctors like Thomas Hamilton and Cartwright thought “afflicted” enslaved people from running from their enslavers. CVZ

The term “seasoning” as forcing assimilation. CVZ

“They’ll see how beautiful I am/ And be ashamed/ I, too, am America.” Quoted Langston Hughes in this piece. CVZ

Robin DG Kelley (2016): “Trump Says Go BAck, We Say Fight Back

“So where do we go from here? If we really care about the world, our country, and our future, we have no choice but to resist...What must resistance  look like? There are at least five things we have to do right now: 1. Build up the sanctuary movement. [...] 2. Defend all of our target communities. [...] 3. Stop referring to the South as a political backwater, a distinctive site of racist right-wing reaction. [...] 4. Support and deepen the anti-Klan and anti-fascist movement. [...] 5. Rebuild the labor movement.” KS

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016): “Black Lives Matter: A Movement, Not a Moment”

“Protests are for everyone--but how do you determine if the protest was successful or not, and how do you draw those who showed up deeper into organizing? Basically, how do you move from protest to movement? Historian Barbara Ransby speaks to this difficulty: ‘While some forms of resistance might be reflexive and simple--that is, when pushed too hard, most of us push back, even if we don’t have a plan or a hope for winning--organizing a movement is different. It is not organic, instinctive, or ever easy. If we think we can all ‘get free’ through individual or uncoordinated small group resistance, we are kidding ourselves.” (175) KS

“#BLM has reinvigorated the Occupy method of protest, which believes decentralized and ‘leaderless’ actions are more democratic, essentially allowing its followers to act on what they want to do without the restraint of others weighing in. … Organizational autonomy and decentralization raise questions of how actions will be coordinated and the concentrated weight of an entire movement brought to bear on targeted institutions. Different locations have different issues: how are local actions woven into a coherent social movement, not just a series of disparate demonstrations with no relationship to each other? If every city, organization, and individual does whatever it/she/he feels empowered to do in the name of the movement, how will we ever transform a series of effective local actions into a national movement” (p. 176-177). KS

“[F]ighting around the demand to be ‘free’ does not clarify the steps it will take to achieve that goal. Demanding everything is as ineffective as demanding nothing, because it obscures what that struggle looks like on a daily basis….This is not an argument for thinking small or abandoning the struggle to completely transform the United States; it is an argument for drawing a distinction between the struggle for reforms that are possible today and the struggle for revolution, which is a longer-term project” (181). KS

“The challenge for the movement is transforming the goal of ‘freedom’ into digestible demands that train and organize its forces so that they have the ability to fight for me, the movement must also have a real plan for building and developing solidarity among the oppressed” (p. 186). KS         

Robin Truth Goodman (2013): “Gender Work: Feminism After Neoliberalism”

“By ‘women’s work,’ I mean a type of labor that in the industrial age was considered domestic, affective, immaterial, or reproductive, and having to do with functions of ‘care’ and socialization… As capital has approached the limits of the universal expansion that Marx imagined for it, ‘women’s work’ has become one of the most viable sites where primitive accumulation can still operate by creating new zones for robust capitalizability and exploitation” (p. 139). KS

“‘Women’s work’ is both constituted as the current face of capital and escapes from that constitution by always constituting anew. The revolutionary strength of ‘women’s work’ is in its destructive opposition to the forces of privatization that try to reduce it to the count--that is, to a quantity of exchange, to measure” (p. 161). KS

Class Notes

by RTO

Everything resists in the now, even though we reflect on what has come before. The significance of mechanization of time

Futurisms: give us a space to imagine a creativity of PoC without framing the experiences of PoC exclusively as deficits. It creates a space of hope, power and generation.

How do we grapple with the points of connection between multiple temporalities?

On Crisis:

Crisis for whom? When were ‘we’ not in crisis?  

“What is the presentness in the present?”- Clarke

What are the histories that we see/feel ourselves living in/with today.

The future as something to be mined, as a practice that needs to happen in the present in order to validate / justify what we are doing. BUT we must perpetually defer the realization of our future potential, in order to avoid disrupting the hegemonic powers of the moment.

Closing words:

ACTIVISM AND RADICAL TRADITIONS

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Highlights from the Readings

Audre Lorde (1984) “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.”

“Your silence will not protect you” (41). KS

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence” (41)? KS

“We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for the final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us” (44). KS

Carol Mueller (2004) “Ella Baker and the Origins of ‘Participatory Democracy”

“On what basis do you seek to organize people? Do you start to try to organize them on the fact of what you think, or what they are first interested in? You start where the people are. Identification with people.” (p. 84). RH

“The three themes of participatory democracy--grassroots involvement by people in the decisions that affect their lives; the minimization of hierarchy and professionalization in organizations working for social change; and direct action on the sources of injustice--grew out of more than twenty years of political experience that she brought to the fledgling student movement in the spring of 1960.” (p. 82). RH

“My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders” (Ella Baker quoted on p. 79). KS

Susan Stall and Randy Stoecker (1998) "Community Organizing or Organizing Community? Gender and the Crafts of Empowerment.”

“The Alinsky model begins with “community organizing”--the public sphere battles between the haves and the have-nots. The women-centered model begins with “organizing community”--building expanded private sphere relationships and empowering individuals through those relations” (733). KS

“Women-centered organizers view justice not as a compromise between self-interested individuals but as a practical reciprocity in the network of relationships that make up community” (739). KS

“In women-centered organizing, power begins in the private sphere of relationships and is thus not conceptualized as zero-sum but as limitless and collective. “Co-active power” is based on human interdependence and the development of all within the group or the community through collaboration. The goal of a women-centered organizing process is “empowerment”--a developmental process that includes building skills through repetitive cycles of action and reflection that evoke new skills and understandings, and in turn provoke new and more effective actions” (741). KS

Astra Taylor (2016): “Against Activism”

“... many strands of contemporary activism risk emphasizing the self over the collective. By contrast, organizing is cooperatvive by definition: it aims to bring others into the fold, to build and exercise shared power.” RH

“... many still believe that action, even when disconnected from any coherent strategy, can magically lead to a kind of societal awakening. Social justice warfare, in turn, emerged from …  a faith that unites social justice warriors and their critics...: that arguing with and attacking strangers online is a form of political engagement as significant as planning a picket or boycott once was. Fortunately, at least for now… there are still plenty of arenas in which real organizing--... education, base-building, and coalition… and what I would describe as creating collective identity and shared economic power--is being done, but these slow-moving efforts are often overshadowed by the latest spectacle or viral outrage.” RH

“Yet organizing is what the left must cultivate to make its activism more durable and effective, to sustain and advance our causes when the galvanizing intensity of occupations or street protests subsides. It is what the left needs in order to roll back the conservative resurgence and cut down the plutocracy it enabled. That means founding political organizations, hashing out long-term strategies, cultivating leaders (of the accountable, not charismatic, variety), and figuring out how to support them financially. No doubt the thriving of activism in recent decades is a good thing, and activism is something we want more of. The problem, rather, is that the organizing that made earlier movements successful has failed to grow apace.”

“To be an activist now merely means to advocate for change, and the hows and whys of that advocacy are unclear. The lack of a precise antonym is telling. Who, exactly, are the non-activists? Are they passivists? Spectators? Or just regular people? In its very ambiguity the word upholds a dichotomy that is toxic to democracy, which depends on the participation of an active citizenry, not the zealotry of a small segment of the population, to truly function.”

“Raising awareness—one of contemporary activism’s preferred aims—can be extremely valuable (at least I hope so, since I have spent so much time trying to do it), but education is not organizing, which involves not just enlightening whoever happens to encounter your message, but also aggregating people around common interests so that they can strategically wield their combined strength. Organizing is long-term and often tedious work that entails creating infrastructure and institutions, finding points of vulnerability and leverage in the situation you want to transform, and convincing atomized individuals to recognize that they are on the same team (and to behave like it).”

“Many strands of contemporary activism risk emphasizing the self over the collective. By contrast, organizing is cooperative by definition: it aims to bring others into the fold, to build and exercise shared power.” KS

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”

“When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. [...] When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym” (3). KS

“Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land. [...] Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism” (19). KS

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.) (2017) How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” KS

“Above all else, our politics initially sprange from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy. [...] We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.” KS

“In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving “correct” political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice.” KS

The Council of the Red Nation (2015) “Native Liberation Struggles in North America: The Red Nation 10-point Program.”

“We find ourselves inhabiting spaces that attempt to violently erase our presence. We rise to claim these spaces to make the unlivable present a livable future, not only for Native people but also for all human and nonhuman relatives who deserve dignified life” (1). KS

“Native people are under constant assault by a capitalist--colonial logic that seeks the erasure of noncapitalist ways of life. Colonial economies interrupt cooperation and association and force people instead into hierarchical relations with agents of colonial authority who function as a permanent occupying force on Native lands. These agents are in place to enforce and discipline Native peoples to ensure that we comply with capitalist-colonial logics. There are … police… corporations…  also so-called ‘normal” social and cultural practices like male dominance, heterosexuality, and individualism that encourage us to conform to the common sense of capitalism--colonialism … The whole system depends on violence to facilitate the accumulation of wealth and power and to suppress other, non-capitalist ways of life that might challenge dominant modes of power.” RH.

Alyson Escalante (2016) “Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto.”

“If an identity politics of non-binary identity cannot liberate us, it is also true that a queer or trans identity politics offers us no hope. Both fall into the same trap of referencing the norm by trying to “do” gender differently. The very basis of such politics is grounded in the logic of identity, which is itself a product of modern and contemporary discourses of power. As we have already shown quite thoroughly, there can be no stable identity which we can reference. Thus, any appeal to a revolutionary or emancipatory identity is only an appeal to certain discourses. In this case, that discourse is gender.” RH

“Thus we affirm there is no true self that can be divined prior to discourses, prior to encounters with others, prior to the mediation of the symbolic. We are products of power, so what are we to do?... the creation of these new identities is not the sudden discovery of previously unknown lived experience, but rather the creation of new terms upon which we can be constituted. All we do when we expand gender categories is to create new more nuanced channels through which power can operate. We do not liberate ourselves, we ensnare ourselves in countless and even more nuanced and powerful norms.” RH

“The gender nihilist, the gender abolitionist, looks at the system of gender itself and sees the violence at its core. We say not to a positive embrace of gender. We want to see it gone. We know appealing to the current formulations of power is always a liberal trap. We refuse to legitimize ourselves.” KS

Johanna Hedva (2014): “Sick Woman Theory”

“If we take Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political – which is still one of the most dominant in mainstream discourse – as being any action that is performed in public, we must contend with the implications of what that excludes. If being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the street.”

“It’s important that I also share the Western medical terminology that’s been attached to me – whether I like it or not, it can provide a common vocabulary: “This is the oppressor’s language,” Adrienne Rich wrote in 1971, “yet I need it to talk to you.” But let me offer another language, too. In the Native American Cree language, the possessive noun and verb of a sentence are structured differently than in English. In Cree, one does not say, “I am sick.” Instead, one says, “The sickness has come to me.” I love that and want to honor it.”

“Sick Woman Theory is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honored, but first made visible. For those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, were never meant to survive: because this world was built against their survival. It’s for my fellow spoonies. You know who you are, even if you’ve not been attached to a diagnosis: one of the aims of Sick Woman Theory is to resist the notion that one needs to be legitimated by an institution, so that they can try to fix you. You don’t need to be fixed, my queens – it’s the world that needs the fixing.”

“To take the term “woman” as the subject-position of this work is a strategic, all-encompassing embrace and dedication to the particular, rather than the universal. Though the identity of “woman” has erased and excluded many (especially women of color and trans and genderfluid people), I choose to use it because it still represents the un-cared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than. The problematics of this term will always require critique, and I hope that Sick Woman Theory can help undo those in its own way. But more than anything, I’m inspired to use the word “woman” because I saw this year how it can still be radical to be a woman in the 21st century. I use it to honor a dear friend of mine who came out as genderfluid last year. For her, what mattered the most was to be able to call herself a “woman,” to use the pronouns “she/her.” She didn’t want surgery or hormones; she loved her body and her big dick and didn’t want to change it – she only wanted the word. That the word itself can be an empowerment is the spirit in which Sick Woman Theory is named.”

“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.” RH

“And, crucially: The Sick Woman is who capitalism needs to perpetuate itself.

Why?

Because to stay alive, capitalism cannot be responsible for our care – its logic of exploitation requires that some of us die.”

“So, as I lay there unable to march, hold up a sign, shout a slogan that would be heard, or be visible in any capacity as a political being, the central question of Sick Woman Theory formed: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” KS

(1990) “The Queer Nation Manifesto.”

“Until I can enjoy the same freedom of movement and sexuality, as straights, their privilege must stop and it must be given over to me and my queer sisters and brothers. Straight people will not do this voluntarily so they must be forced into it. Straights must be frightened into it. Terrorized into it. Fear is the most powerful motivation.”

“Your life is in your hands. When I risk it all to be out, I risk it for both of us. When I risk it all and it works (which it often does if you would try it), I benefit and so do you. When it doesn't work, I suffer and you do not. But girl you can't wait for other dykes to make the world safe for you. STOP waiting for a better more lesbian future! The revolution could be here if we started it. Where are you sisters? I'm trying to find you, I'm trying to find you. How come I only see you on Gay Pride Day? We're OUT, Where the fuck are YOU?” KS

Alicia Garza (2017): “Our cynicism will not build a movement. Collaboration will”

“I decided to challenge myself to be a part of something that isn’t perfect, that doesn’t articulate my values the way that I do and still show up, clear in my commitment, open and vulnerable to people who are new in their activism. I can be critical of white women and, at the same time, seek out and join with women, white and of color, who are awakening to the fact that all lives do not, in fact, matter, without compromising my dignity, my safety and radical politics.”

“I agree with Solange when she says, “I got a lot to be mad about, and I have a right to be mad.” But that anger is not enough. It is insufficient to build or take power. Anger will not change the fact that Republicans have taken control of all three branches of government and control both chambers of the legislature in 32 states. Anger will not stop vigilantes from terrorizing our communities, and anger will not change an economy that deems too many of us as disposable. More than a moral question, it is a practical one. Can we build a movement of millions with the people who may not grasp our black, queer, feminist, intersectional, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist ideology but know that we deserve a better life and who are willing to fight for it and win?”

“If our movement is not serious about building power, then we are just engaged in a futile exercise of who can be the most radical.”

David Graeber (2009) Direct Action: An Ethnography.

“Direct action means insisting on acting as if one is already free” (207).

“To sum up, then: direct action represents a certain ideal--in its purest form, probably unattainable. It is a form of action in which means and ends become, effectively, indistinguishable; a way of actively engaging with the world to bring about change, in which the form of the action--or at least, the organization of the action--is itself a model for the change one wishes to bring about” (210).

Loretta Ross (2019): “I’m a Black Feminist. I think Call-Out Culture is Toxic.”

“But most public shaming is horizontal and done by those who believe they have greater integrity or more sophisticated analysis. They become the self-appointed guardians of political purity. Call-outs make people fearful of being targeted. People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of the cancel culture.” RH

“Calling-in engages in debates with words and actions of healing and restoration, and without the self-indulgence of drama.” RH

“My experiences with call-outs began in the 1970s as a young black feminist activist. I sharply criticized white women for not understanding women of color. I called them out while trying to explain intersectionality and white supremacy. I rarely questioned whether the way I addressed their white privilege was actually counterproductive. They barely understood what it meant to be white women in the system of white supremacy. Was it realistic to expect them to comprehend the experiences of black women?”

[TW: Sexual violence] “But I wonder if contemporary social movements have absorbed the most useful lessons from the past about how to hold each other accountable while doing extremely difficult and risky social justice work. Can we avoid individualizing oppression and not use the movement as our personal therapy space? Thus, even as an incest and hate crime survivor, I have to recognize that not every flirtatious man is a potential rapist, nor every racially challenged white person is a Trump supporter.”

“‘People don’t understand that organizing isn’t going online and cussing people out or going to a protest and calling something out,” Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, wrote in “How We Fight White Supremacy,’”

“For example, when I worked to deprogram incarcerated rapists in the 1970s, I told the story of my own sexual assaults. It opened the floodgates for theirs. They were candid about having raped women, admitted having done it to men or revealed being raped themselves. As part of our work together, they formed Prisoners Against Rape, the country’s first anti-sexual assault program led by men.

I believe #MeToo survivors can more effectively address sexual abuse without resorting to the punishment and exile that mirror the prison industrial complex. Nor should we use social media to rush to judgment in a courtroom composed of clicks. If we do, we run into the paradox Audre Lorde warned us about when she said that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

We can build restorative justice processes to hold the stories of the accusers and the accused, and work together to ascertain harm and achieve justice without seeing anyone as disposable people and violating their human rights or right to due process.”

“Transformative justice in an era of mass incarceration with Mariame Kaba and Victoria Law”

Aja Romano. 2018. “Hopepunk, the latest storytelling trend, is all about weaponized optimism.”

Hot Takes
Quotes from other places...

Mignolo, Walter and Walsh, Catherine. 2018. On Deocoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke University Press.

Chapter 6: the conceptual triad: Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality,

And these excerpts from chapter

“What is necessary here is to understand how the narratives built around the idea of modernity, its rhetoric and goals, assumed the logic of noncontradiction and the semantic of binary opposition. It is this assumption that made and still makes it possible to tell stories and brand promises and build hopes of salva- tion, progress, development, democracy, growth, and so on; stories that hide and silences coloniality: the darker side of Western modernity. Decolonial thinking is akin to nonmodern ways of thinking grounded on cosmologies of complementary dualities (and/and) rather than on dichotomies or contra- dictory dualities (either/or).

…

The system of oppositions and the logic of noncontradiction were set up, since the European Renaissance (antiquity, medieval) and since the Enlightenment (primitives, traditional) by chronology and by geography (Saracens, barbarians, uncivilized, underdeveloped, communists, terrorists).Human was the classifying entity in the process of defining itself as such. Since the Renaissance the rhetoric of modernity was and continues to be built on the logic of coloniality: the denial and disavowal of non-European local times and spaces and non-European ways of life. The rhetoric of modernity was built on the opposition between Christians and non-Christians, masculine and feminine, white and nonwhite, progress and stagnation, developed and underdeveloped, First and Second/Third World.” (p. 155)

“Cultural classifications are made, not ontologically inscribed in what- ever is classified. Hence, classifications are cultural because they are inven- tions, not representations. Classifications are epistemic building of ontologies…. Capitalism names a type of knowl- edge that justified and justifies he subjugation of noncapitalist economies.

Hence, the basic, most fundamental, decolonial task is in the domain of knowledge, since it is knowledge that holds the cmp together and that con-form subjectivities whether of theological believers or of supposed free subjects of secular subjectivities, as I explained in chapter 6. Managing and controlling knowledge means managing and controlling subjects… To change the world, as Karl Marx stated, it is imperative to change the hegemonic knowledge that holds the in- terpretation of the world, in all dimensions of knowledge, from physics and biology to philosophy and theology, from political economy to political theory, from the hegemonic conception of the human (and its derivation, posthuman) to racism and sexism. The “world” cannot be changed if the “knowledge and the knower of the world” do not change. …

Cultural classifications and ranking is a strategy of the rhe- toric of modernity enacting coloniality by disguising colonial differences (that we do not see) into cultural difference (that we are taught to see). Colonial differences established and still establish hierarchy and a power differential— from the Moors and the Jews in Europe to the Blacks and the Indians in the New World; from witches in medieval Europe to the invisibility of non- European women.... Classification is knowledge (epistemology) not representation of existing ranked and organized partition (ontologies). Colonial and imperial differences are fundamental tools of Western global designs.” (p. 177-179)  

Class Notes

Blue: notes by RTO

A word cloud from our whiteboard exercise:

What is Activism & what else might we theorize as political action

How we define these concepts / works also affects who is rendered visible or not. ((How much knowledge is ‘prerequisite’ to be able to meaningfully participate))

Not all bodys/ideology are able to ‘activist’ in the same way or through the same bodies. This [can/often] present as creativity… but also it might be out of necessity/ defence?

Activisms as a creative imagination of the future.

What kinds of freedom dreams and political possibilities do these approaches open up or foreclose?

Does these imaginations presume particular kinds of political actions & subjects?

Multiple readings mention a very explicit anti-capitalist idea, by recognizing the ways in which the current state of Capitalism which oppresses the vast majority of people in this world.

Tensions across readings:

Decolonization is not only a thought exercise, but about tangible returns (i.e. land) that enable (new) ways of thinking. What has coloniality done to us in the present to make us who we are? And what does it mean for us to undo this?

What does it mean to try to/ask to separate mind/body/spirit?

Brittany Packnett - the celebrity activist network.

Rhetorical Violence

Epistemic Injustice

Purple notes by JMC :)

Reflection Discussion

 

We're not pivoting between reflection and readings; we're layering.

 

Audre Lorde (1984), "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" in Sister Outsider

"What are the words you do not have yet?..." (41)

"We can learn to work and speak…" (44)

Poetry is not a luxury - anyone can write poetry. Theory is not a luxury - anyone can theorize (epistemic justice/injustice).

 

Orientations

Local Examples of the “state” adapting to maintain injustice and inequality

Readings Overview

Paradigms of Collective/Political Action: Ella Baker, Women-Centered Approach - Elevating the work/individuals who have been invisibilized

Manifestos: Positing and destabilizing ways of seeing ourselves

Movement Work and Spaces - challenges and pitfalls

Working Groups

-student and youth organizing

- philadelphia communities

STRUGGLES TO TRANSFORM THE SCHOOL

 mixtape | slides

Highlights from the Readings

Henry Giroux (2001) “Reproduction, Resistance, & Accommodation in the Schooling Process.”

“Dominant ideologies are not simply transmitted in schools, nor are they practiced in a void. On the contrary, they are often met with resistance by teachers, students, or parents, and must therefore, to be successful, repress the production of counter-ideologies. Moverover, schools are not simply static institutions that reproduce the dominant ideology, they are active agents in its construction as well” (91). KS

“The concept of resistance represents more than a new heuristic catchword in the language of radical pedagogy--it represents a mode of discourse that rejects traditional explanations of school failure and oppositional behavior. [...] Resistance in this case redefines the causes and meaning of oppositional behavior by arguing that it has little to do with the logic of deviance, individual pathology, learned helplessness (and, of course, genetic explanation), and a great deal to do [...] with the logic of moral and political indignation” (107). KS

Matthey Countryman (2005) “Community Control of the Schools”

“In the meeting [between school board officials and student leaders of the 1967 student walkout], the students presented a number of demands, including the addition of black history courses taught by black teachers, the assignment of black principals to black schools, increased black representation on the school board, exemption from the requirement that students salute the flag, and the removal of police and nonteaching assistants from all schools” (225). KS

“In this sense, entrenched white support for racialized hierarchies within public institutions like the Philadelphia public schools was as much a cause of the urban violence of the late 1960s as black radical activism. The violent talk and acts of black activists in Philadelphia were less the spontaneous explosion of a dream deferred than the cumulative result of the constant interracial tensions and violence that existed in the city’s schools and on the streets of its working class neighborhoods” (255). KS

“By combining the demand for black studies courses with the call for community control of the public schools in black neighborhoods, BPUM [Black People’s Unity Movement] activists were able to shift the focus of black educational advocacy in the city from school desegregation to efforts to raise the quality of schooling in predominantly black schools” (256). KS

  Kristina Rizga (2016) “Black Teachers Matter” 

“During the civil rights movement, black educators were leaders in fighting for increased opportunity, including more equitable school funding and a greater voice for communities in running schools and districts. But today, as buildings like Germantown High stand shuttered, these changes are slowly being rolled back. In Philadelphia and across the country, scores of schools have been closed, radically restructured, or replaced by charter schools. And in the process, the face of the teaching workforce has changed. In one of the most far-reaching consequences of the past decade’s wave of education reform, the nation has lost thousands of experienced black teachers and principals.” KS

“‘There are so many layers to this pattern of destruction,’ Robin Roberts, the parent of three children in Philadelphia’s public schools and a physical therapist for the district, told me. “Germantown is such a tight-knit, established community. There is old blood. Collected history. Gorgeous brownstones. And you rip that school out, leaving a huge open lot. No security. It’s dead energy, and it invites people and events that you have no control over. Property values of folks living there go down. When a community has a vibrant, living, interactive school, property values increase. Houses look better. All of these closures--its erasure of history of these established communities.” KS

Susan Booysen (ed.) (2016) Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa.

“Driven by Frantz Fanon’s belief that ‘...decolonisation, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder’ (Fanon 1963: 36), #RhodesMustFall changed the nature of transformation discourse to a broader discussion of access and the success of black students in an institution seen as colonial/apartheid artefact disrupting their progress. [...] Fallism should be understood as the reinvigorated process in which the decolonisation project has been renewed in the higher education system and in society at large” (58-59). KS

“To understand the Must Fall movement’s spread to Euro-America through the lens of Gramsci, Foucault or Marx is already to misunderstand it. Certainly, ‘traditional’ theory can illuminate certain aspects of the movement, but it cannot capture its anti-hegemonic and unmistakably Southern bent. ‘Fallism’ is a nascent, complicated and emerging viewpoint, combining aspects of decolonial thought, black consciousness, radical feminism, and pan-Africanism” (82). KS

Eve L. Ewing (2018) “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side”

“Institutional mourning is the social and emotional experience undergone by individuals and communities facing the loss of a shared institution they are affiliated with--such as a school, church, residence, neighborhood, or business district--especially when those individuals or communities occupy a socially marginalized status that amplifies their reliance on the institution or its significance in their lives” (127). KS

“A school closing is much more than the loss of an interchangeable building. It can be a harbinger of things to come, the culmination of multiple generations of racism and injustice and a blatant disregard of the fundamental reality within which a community understands itself. A school closure can thus be a devastating event, that leaves an indelible emotional aftermath” (127). KS

Movement for Black Lives (2016) “A Vision for Black Lives” 

“Inequitable funding at the school district, local and state level leave most public schools--where poor communities of color are the majority--unable to provide adequate and high quality education for all students…” KS

“Under the current U.S. constitution, education is not a constitutional right, which means that states within the U.S. make their own laws and allocate their little-to-no resources for public schools. As a result, education in this country is grossly unequal and underfunded.” KS

This American Life. “The Problem We  All Live With”

“Your zip code is that anchor that traps you.” KS

“With Brown v. Board of Education, we as a nation decided that segregated schooling violated the constitutional rights of black children. We promised that we would fix this wrong. And when it proved difficult, as we knew it would be, we said integration failed instead of the truth, which is that it was working, but we decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble.” KS

Precious Knowledge

Stefano Harney & Fred Moten. (2013). The University and the Undercommons

“To enter this space [the undercommons] is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured discolsure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the tlife stolen by enlightmenment and stolen back, where the commons give refugge, twhere the regue gives the commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing’ its it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection…” (28) RH

“… to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of that internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions.” (31) RH

“It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of--this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university” (26). KS

"To distance oneself professionally through critique, is this not the most active consent to privatize the social individual? The undercommons might by contrast be understood as wary of critique, wear of it, and at the same time dedicated to the collectivity of its future, the collectivity that may come to be its future. (38) RH

Abigail Boggs et al. (2019). Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation

“One of the defining features of the university in the U.S. context is the accumulation of lands, lives, resources, and relationships. The university’s appearance of necessity is no mere mirage but rather the effect of its centrality within settler colonial and racial capitalist regimes of accumulation. To turn the university into an object of analysis, a site of intervention, and a resource to be exploited, abolitionist university studies needs to account for the shifting regimes of accumulation that constitute the university as such” (3) KS

“To think through the university through an abolitionist mode entails approaching our study of and relationship to such institutions through a combination of social critique and a willingness to struggle to think and build the impossible. We have chosen this name, a name that positions the university as the object of abolition, in an effort to short-circuit the university’s claims of a priori goodness, as a way of making the university newly available for thinking. For us, an abolitionist approach is one which confronts the foundational epistemological and material violences of the U.S. state, liberalism, and capitalism” (4). KS

“To refuse and replace narratives of university history conditioned by white settler memory, an abolitionist university studies highlights counter-memories from the perspectives of people such as Native Americans, who have been involved in worldmaking projects alternative to liberal-capitalist modernity, and whose perspectives have been obscured or elided in the dominant narratives. Putting their counter-memories in conversation with contemporary movements for liberation offers avenues for building an abolition university.” (12) RH

Bettina Love. (2019) Abolitionist Teaching, Freedom Dreaming, and Black Joy

“Abolitionist teaching starts with freedom dreaming, dreams grounded in a critique of injustice. These dreams are not whimsical, unattainable daydreams, they are critical and imaginative dreams of collective resistance” (101). KS

“Freedom dreaming gives teachers a collective space to methodically tear down the education survival complex and collectively rebuild a school system that truly loves all children and sees schools as children’s homeplaces where students are encouraged to give this world hell” (102). KS

“Finding joy in the midst of pain and trauma is the fight to be fully human” (119). KS

“Restorative Justice in School: An Overview”

Class Notes by JMC

Readings:

Giroux

Up South

Black Teachers Matter

Fees Must Fall - decolonizing the university and societies around the world

Podcast - contemporary segregation

Precious Knowledge (documentary) - Mexican American studies in Arizona

Abolitionism in the context of schooling: Bettina Love, Abolitionist University Studies

Orientations

What have been some of the dominant ways of theorizing The School?

How do these theories of schooling relate to configurations of power and the relationships between schools, individual actors, collectivities, the state, and society?

What have been some of the struggles to transform or provide alternatives to The School as we know it? What were their challenges and limitations? What can we learn from these examples?

What could/should The School, teaching/learning look like given the needs of our societies and world?

What ways of being/becoming does abolitionism offer us and how does it inform our praxis?

*Talk tomorrow on abolitionist university building - See Prof. Strong’s email!

*On Saturday, Melanated Educators is having their annual conference on Saturday. Bettina Love is the keynote!

*Nicole Hannah-Jones speaking next week!

Learning about Podcasts

Things to pay attention to:

How much of aesthetics are related to recording technique versus editing?

*Tutorial on Canvas

*Can also take course on Lynda.com

POWER AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

 mixtape | slides

Highlights from the Readings

Martin Saar (2014) “Power”

“The Weberian idea that power refers to an actor’s capacity to influence or determine another actor’s behavior or to carry out his or her will, even against the other’s resistance, has been the core of the traditional concept of power, and it has been reformulated in many ways” (1098) - RH

“Several theories of power have tried to [... focus] less on individual acts of power exercise between people and more on the very creation of social relationships or even social entities through power. [...] This sets power in sharp contrast to domination and expresses the idea that power has to be created collectively and is not just there to be found. But it also shows that power is the very basis on which collective social action is possible and that it can never be full substituted by the rule of force or violence. Power, as it were, manifests itself as empowerment, as the bringing about of new forms of agency” (1100). KS

“To say that power not only acts on but even “produces” bodies and subjects requires speaking about power in terms of social ontology and the very constitution of the social. This does not mean that power as constitution is not bound up with systems of control, repression, and hierarchization. On the contrary, one can argue that the efficacy of certain systems of control and regulation exist on the basis of their capacity to produce and shape the affects, mentalities, and self-conceptions of subject.” (1100) - RH

Christian Scholl (2016) “Prefiguration”

“The politicization of subjectivity and interpersonal relations has politicized integrity: people are now called upon to have their daily practice fully reflect their political values” (323). KS

“Conceptually, prefiguration marked a rejection of both centrism and vanguardism. For her part, Breines (1989, 6-7) distinguished between “strategic politics” aimed at structural changes, and “prefigurative politics” aimed at creating communal embodiments of the desired society. In this view “prefigurative politics” offered a means of moving beyond a demand-based politics focused primarily on socio-economic issues” (323) - RH

“As Engler and Engler (2014a) put it, ‘if the project building alternative community totally eclipses attempts to communicate with the wider public and win broad support, it risks becoming a very limiting type of self-isolation’”  (324) - RH

Frances Fox Piven (2008) Can Power from Below Change the World?

“I propose that there is another kind of power [interdependent power] based not on resources, thing, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life. Think of societies as composed of networks of cooperative relations, more or less institutionalized [...]. Social life is cooperative life, and in principle, all people who make contributions to these systems of cooperation have potential power over others who depend on them.” (p. 5) - RH

“The actualization of interdependent power typically requires that people break the rules that govern the institutions in which they participate, if only because those rules are designed to suppress interdependent power. People must also recognize that they have some power, that elites also depend on the masses. People have to organize, to contrive ways of acting in concert, at least insofar as concerted action is necessary to make their power effective” (8). KS

“[...] social life is complicated, and political action takes form within a matrix of social relations. Those who try to mobilize disruptive power must overcome the constraints typically imposed by their multiple relations with others [...] Of course, the process of reform will be complicated and the outcomes shaped not only by interdependent power, but also by the complex institutional structures we inherit, cultural memory, and the concentrate power resources of aggrandizing elites. All that said, without the tempering influence of movements from below and the interdependent power they wield, our future is ominous.” (12) RH

John Holloway (2002) “Beyond Power?”

This document is a subjective collection of quotes and passages from other chapters of Change the World without Taking Power (Holloway, 2002) that I have found generative and contextual to my personal understanding of chapter 3’s argument. - RH

“The notion of capturing positions of power, whether it be governmental power or more dispersed positions of power in society misses the point that the aim of the revolution is to dissolve relations of power, to create a society based on the mutual recognition of people’s dignity. What has failed is the notion that revolution means capturing power in order to abolish power” (20). KS

“All our categories of thought, all our assumptions about what is reality, or what is politics or economics or even where we live, are so permeated by power that just to say “no!” to power precipitates us into a vertiginous world in which there are no fixed reference points to hold on to other than the force of our own ‘no!” Power and social theory exist in such symbiosis that power is the lens through which theory sees the world [...]. To try to theorize anti-power is to wander in a largely unexplored world. How can the world be changed without taking power? The answer is obvious: we do not know. That is why it is so important to work at the answer, practically and theoretically” (22). KS

“The struggle to liberate power-to is not the struggle to construct a counter-power, but rather an anti-power, something that is radically different from power-over. Concepts of revolution that focus on the taking of power are typically centred on the notion of counter-power. The strategy is to construct a counter-power, a power that can stand against the ruling power. Often the revolutionary movement has been constructed as a mirror image of power, army against army, party against party, with the result that power reproduces itself within the revolution itself. Anti- power, then, is not counter-power, but something much more radical: it is the dissolution of power-over, the emancipation of power-to. This is the great, absurd, inevitable challenge of the communist dream: to create a society free of power relations through the dissolution of power-over.” (p. 36-37) -RH

Charlene A. Carriuthers (2018) Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. Excerpts

“There are three collective commitments our movements must take up to regenerate: 1. Building many strong leaders, 2. Adopting healing justice as a core organizing value and practice, 3. Combating liberalism with principled struggle.” KS

“Everyone invested in collective liberation must answer the following questions critical to determining the health and success of our movements: Who am I? Who are my people? What do we want? What are we building? Are we ready to win?” KS

“Community organizing for our collective liberation requires interpersonal and sound relationships with the natural world around us. I believe in organizing with groups of people to create the type of world we want future generations to live in. The gap between the world as it is and as I want it to be expands and contracts, and I can’t control the size of the disconnection, but I believe the gap gets smaller when I organize with people along lines of shared interests, values, and vision.”  -RH

“Principled struggle means that we talk with each other from a place that allows mutual dignity. Principled struggle means that our conclusions about people, events, and organizations are as sound as possible, grounded in observation, and recognizing that even then our assessment may not be valid.” -RH

adrienne maree brown (2017) Emergent Strategy

“Small is good, small is all.

Change is constant. (Be like water).

There is always time for the right work.

There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.

Never a failure, always a lesson.

Trust the People. (if you trust the people, they become trustworth).

Move at the speed of trust. [...]

Less prep, more presence.

What you pay attention to grows” (41-42). KS

“How we live and grow and stay purposeful in the face of constant change actually does determine both the quality of our lives, and the impact that we can have when we move into action together” (69) KS

“Do you already know that your existence--who and how you are--is in and of itself a contribution to the people and place around you? Not after or because you do some particular thing, but simply the miracle of your life. And that the people around you, and the place(s), have contributions as well? Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in?” (91) KS

Asian American Racial Justice Toolkit

“In this volatile moment, racial justice advocates face an urgent mandate to inspire visions of a future America based on inclusion and interdependence, rather than on division and domination. This future requires building mass consciousness to see race not as the classification of human difference, but as a mythology created in service to broadly damaging systems of plunder and control. It requires engaging in rigorous political imagination and struggle to forge new ways of seeing our humanity in one another across race and national borders. Building this consciousness is as much a cultural project as it is a political one. As Brazilian educator Paulo Freire reminds us, “hope needs practice in order to become historical concreteness.” (4) KS

“The original mission of the Asian American movement was to contest the underlying forces behind those experiences – racism, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism – by working across ethnic, racial, and national boundaries. [...] The interests animating the Asian American movement today are the same as they were 50 years ago – to end war, violence, poverty, racism, and xenophobia. The stakes are tangible and deep” (5). KS

“We acknowledge that we, as Asians, have often been used as part of a “divide-and- conquer” strategy to uphold white supremacy. We refuse to be used as tools to uphold a racist and violent system” (317). KS

Regotsofetse Chikane (2018) Breaking A Rainbow, Building a Nation

“Can coconuts be trusted with the revolution? Can they undergo a process of rejection that involves the removal of their complicity within a system that offers them opportunities for advancement, while simultaneously explicitly denouncing it, using the privileges the same system has vested in them?” (15) KS

“Coconuts and the black elite, like any other group within #MustFall movements, will try to steer the movement in a direction that favours them best. But unlike other groups who compete for the soul of the #MustFall movements, we hide in the tall grass, hoping that no one sees us, yet banking on the knowledge that enough people can sense our presence. We unconsciously influence #MustFall politics to protect our self interest under the impression that our acts are for the greater good. The presence of a bigger villain allows the gaze to turn away from us. We are asked questions we’re never truly expected to answer and as a result, in the same way that we traverse our post-apartheid society, coconuts chart the landscape of #MustFall politics; cautious, conniving, curious and always cunning” (234). KS

Patrisse Cullors (2019) “Abolition and Reparations: Histories of Resistance, Transformative Justice and Accountability.”

“Abolition calls on us not only to destabilize, deconstruct, and demolish oppressive systems, institutions, and practices, but also to repair histories of harm across the board” (1686) KS

“Abolition must be a cultural intervention. It must produce a new way of being even in the most challenging and difficult moments. We have not collectively practiced abolition so it’s hard for us to understand its significance. But, if we implement a new practice that is centered in care and dignity, we might find a practice that challenges our instinct to “cancel” each other. Abolition is about how we treat each other. It is about how we show up in relationships. Abolition is about how we respond to harm caused and how we respond when we cause harm. It is differentiating between large-scale systems that have been built to perpetuate our harm, and individual harm caused against one another. I don’t believe abolition is about bullying, but I do believe abolition is about standing up for yourself. We need to be committed to building a culture that is rooted in care, dignity, and accountability” (1694) KS

Antony Dapiran (2019) “’Be Water!’: seven tactics that are winning Hong Kong’s democracy revolution.”

“Hong Kong’s young protesters are eschewing the fixed, immobile occupation strategies of the past, in favour of a highly mobile, agile style of protest. A rally may turn into a march; a march may begin in one direction and abruptly change to another direction; the focus of a particular protest action may only emerge in the course of the march itself. [...] As Bruce Lee said, “Water can flow, or it can crash!” KS

Jacqueline Villarrubia-Mendoza and Roberto Vélez-Vélez. (2019). “Puerto Rico: The Shift from Mass Protests to People’s Assemblies.”.

“It is too soon to know whether this newly acquired power will lead to a radical change in the political structure of the island and, if so, what type of change. What is certain is that the sense of empowerment produced by people’s participation in the mass mobilizations has undoubtedly led to a  political awakening. These assemblies suggest that people are beginning a process of appropriation and probing of participatory democracy and its vectors—that is, empowerment, self-management, and self-determination. The shift from street demonstrations to people’s assemblies suggests “the proposal behind the protest,” a principle that challenges those mobilized by grievances to construct their own solutions and present them as alternatives to the current state of affairs.” KS

Youth United for Change (2019) “Y’all Tryna Win or Nah? Lessons on Organization Development and Youth Organizing on Shifting Terrain.”

“In the United States, young people of color generally become conscious of unjust power dynamics, resource inequity, and institutional racism within the school classrooms they inhabit the majority of their fledgling lives. This is why YUC’s organizing is aimed at establishing educational/ economic justice through systems change, as well as encouraging broader engagement of civil society by Black and Brown youth and their communities. [...] In the midst of all of this activity, the adult staff and membership of YUC have been wrestling with what “winning” actually looks like for our people. Though we take pride in what we have been able to achieve thus far, more is needed if true equity and justice are ever to take root in our society. [...] For us, we are clear that operating as a special interest advocacy group is not enough. We need to develop a new generation of visionary and progressive leaders committed to compelling America to live up to its ideals by all means at their disposal” (4). KS

“Winning requires a collective commitment to complex authenticity, perpetual learning, and hard- nosed rigor. Winning requires an unrelenting, ruthless criticism of all of our assumptions about our world, our work, our people, and ourselves. Winning requires sharing uncomfortable truths about our practice and organizations, not to shame or ostracize one another, but to help all of us avoid repeating mistakes that inhibit our collective ability to achieve liberation. Finally, winning requires taking calculated risks based on material assessments and shedding obsolete organizing practices and tactics when they outlive their usefulness based on such assessments. If our sector begins to do such things at a mass scale in partnership with other key social movement sectors, we can potentially witness a progression of societal transformation we have not seen since the advent of Reconstruction” (5). KS

Class Notes

Readings on Power

Orientations

Working Groups

ENGAGING COMMUNITIES AND PUBLICS

 mixtape | slides

Highlights from the Readings

Eve Tuck (2009) “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities”

“Here I am concerned with research [...] that invites oppressed peoples to speak but to ‘only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak from your pain’ (hooks, 1990, p. 152). [...] Common sense tells us this is a good thing, but the danger of damage-centered research is that it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community” (413). KS

“Many communities engage, allow, and participate in damage-centered research and in the constructing of damage-centered research and in the construction of damage narratives as a strategy for correcting oppression. However, I worry that the theory of change itself may be unreliable and ineffective. [...] Do the material and political win come through? And, most importantly, are the wins worth the long-term costs of thinking of ourselves as damaged?” (414-415). KS

“One alternative to damage-centered research is to craft our research to capture desire instead of damage. [...] desire-based research frameworks are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives. [...] This is to say that even when communities are broken and conquered, they are so much more than that--so much more that this incomplete story is an act of oppression (416). KS

M.E. Torre et al (2012)  Critical participatory action research as public science.

“Joining social movements and public science, critical PAR [critical participatory action research] projects document the grossly unequal structural distributions of opportunities, resources, and dignity; trouble ideological categories projected onto communities (delinquent, at risk, damaged, innocent, victim); and contest how “science” has been recruited to legitimate dominant policies and practices” (171). KS

“There is no single way to conduct critical PAR. Rather, we believe critical participatory researchers are bound by a set of critical and participatory commitments throughout the research process, such as finding ways to harness varying forms of expertise; constructing what questions most need asking; collaborating to develop both theory and method; coanalyzing data; and creating ongoing and multiple forms of dissemination with a principled purpose of working against unjust, oppressive structures” (175). KS

Michael Warner (2002)  “Publics and Counterpublics”

“The way the public functions in the public sphere--as the people--is only possible because it is really a public of discourse. It is self-creating and self-organized, and herein lies its power as well as its elusive strangeness.”

“Nancy Fraser observed that when public discourse is understood only as a ‘single, comprehensive, overarching public,’ members of subordinated groups ‘have no arenas for deliberation among themselves about their needs, objectives, and strategies.’ In fact, Fraser writes, ‘members of subor-dinated social groups—women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians—have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics.’ She calls these “subaltern counterpublics,” by which she means “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (85). KS

Michael Bérubé (2019) “Talking out of School: Academic Freedom and Extramural Speech.”

“Now is the time to insist that the extramural speech of university professors is vitally important to the functioning of a free society, especially when it involves academic expertise in things like climate change, colonialism, race relations, gender and sexuality, ethnocentrism, poverty, medicine, technology, urban planning, ecology . . . and, among many other things, theories of justice. Now is the time to insist that extramural speech is a vital aspect of academic freedom—precisely because the struggle for academic freedom is the struggle for democracy.” KS

--Note from KS: Part of Bérubé’s argument is a disagreement with Butler’s claim (see next entry) that academic freedom and freedom of political expressions are separate. He thinks freedom of political expression should be an aspect of academic freedom, though they both agree that it should be protected.

Judith Butler (2018) “The Criminalization of Knowledge.”

“Since scholars are also citizens, academic freedom includes the provision that academics are entitled, like all citizens, to engage in political expression. When extramural expression takes the form of political dissent against authoritarian regimes, the university has an obligation not to let the state inside the door of the university to quell that speech.” KS

“Although academic freedom and freedom of political expression are not the same, punishing academics for their real or imagined political power tells us something about the role of universities within democratic life. Universities produce ideas that have a life of their own; the free circulation of those ideas is part of democratic political culture, and the protection of that circulation is an obligation of democratic societies.” KS

Steven Salaita (2019) “My Life as a Cautionary Tale: Probing the Limits of academic freedom.”

“When I make a public comment, I don’t care if it conforms to the etiquette of a speech manual. I’m instead concerned with the needs and aspirations of the dispossessed. Conditioning critique on the conventions of bourgeois civil liberties, and in deference to specters of recrimination, abrogates any meaningful notion of political independence. To ignore those conventions, to engage the world based on a set of fugitive values, will necessarily frustrate those in power in ways that require protection beyond the scope of academic freedom.” KS

“I was a tenured faculty member for 12 years and count myself among the complicit. I didn’t do nearly enough to support my contingent comrades — because I didn’t properly see them as comrades, something my position informally demanded.  We all know, in personal moments of brutal honesty, that radical devotion to lesser classes is almost always just professional branding — that deep down we’re scared of the punishment that awaits if we offend the wrong people. Academic freedom doesn’t take away the fear because we know that management can always find ways around it.” KS

Penn Disorientation Guide

ABC Penn and Community Partnerships Working Group

Vanjessica Gladney. Feb. 28 2018. “We Challenged Penn to Reexamine Its History of Slavery—And Our Project Isn't Over.”

“The early trustees of the University of Pennsylvania helped design symbols of American freedom while keeping other men in bondage.” KS

“This research is not supposed to start a competition to see which institution has the fewest ties to the American slave trade. This is not an attack on Penn’s reputation. This is a search for the truth. The desire for reassurance that one institution’s history is less problematic than another speaks to a reluctance to engage in a genuine discussion about slavery.” KS

Abul-Aliy Muhammad. July 21 2019. “As reparations debate continues, the University of Pennsylvania has a role to play.”

“In response to the Penn & Slavery Project’s work, the university reversed its stance asserting it had no historical ties to slavery and announced it would form a working group to explore the issue further. Still, it is disturbing that bodily remains of enslaved people are warehoused at a school, to highlight the discredited science of a former professor in the name of historical preservation. I was appalled when learning about this during both a symposium on the Penn & Slavery Project and the spring final presentations of student researchers in April. I launched a change.org petition demanding the university return the remains to descendants — if possible — or inter them immediately.”

“Black people deserve reparations from institutions that benefited from the violence of the enslavement we experienced for generations. Penn is among the guilty. It also arguably continues to harm local black communities in West Philadelphia by driving residential displacement through university expansion. At the very least Penn can disavow Morton, and bury our ancestors.”

Bronx Community Research Review Board

“In order to protect the disadvantaged and vulnerable populations in the Bronx from academic research abuse, such as lying about the potential dangers of studies or violating their human rights, a group of passionate community members established The Bronx Community Research Review Board (BxCRRB). We are advocates for the Bronx, working to create a better life for everyone in our community.”

“No Research About Us Without Us: BxCRRB was founded in 2008 as a way to add community-focused oversight to the research review process. Drawing from the expertise and knowledge of these organizations, BxCRRB was able to form a volunteer board that could learn about the processes and best practices of an academic research study. By combining this training with genuine understanding and familiarity of the unique needs and nuances of Bronx residents, BxCRRB has been able to educate researchers on what is ethically and culturally beneficial to our community.”

Histories of Home: A Walk With Northside Neighbors

“Histories of Home is an invitation to listen to everyday history-makers. Featuring the voices of over a dozen community members and narrated by Northside natives, this audio tour is an introduction to some of the stories, struggles, and aspirations of our community.”

“The Value of Oral History: Oral history is at the center of the Jackson Center’s organizing model. It teaches us values, visions, struggles, and victories of every day history-makers, and it has continued to ground our work in listening and to inspire all of us to build a more just community together.

Our primary aim is to listen well: to hear and to carry forward histories shaped by abiding values and visions for vibrant community. We want to make sure that the histories of everyday, courageous and faithful leadership that we are privileged to hear—and to hold in the Jackson Center Oral History Trust—make a difference in our communities now and for generations to come.

Morris Justice Project

“Morris Justice is a Participatory Action Research (PAR) Project.  PAR is an approach to research rooted in the belief that valid knowledge is produced only in collaboration and in action, and that those typically “studied” should be architects of the process.  Morris Justice is guided by the critical social knowledge of residents of a NYC "hot spot," a neighborhood that is subjected to a disproportionate amount of aggressive and discriminatory policing in the name of "community safety."  It is an in-depth investigation into the lived experience of NYPD's "hot spot" policy and "stop and frisk" practices, and the community's vision of community safety.”

“Sidewalk Science: Throughout the summer of 2013 we did "Sidewalk Science" around the MJP neighborhood, creating opportunities to discuss and continue our research with residents. We did critical mapping, made and distributed data t-shirts and buttons, constructed Community Safety Walls, handed out our back-pocket report, and talked to people about the implications of the Community Safety Act and Floyd Trial. See more here.”

Taja Lindley: The Bag Lady Manifesta.  “This Ain’t a Eulogy: A Ritual for Re-Membering.”

“Based on Taja Lindley's solo healing performance ritual that debuted at La Mama's SQUIRTS in 2015, "This Ain't A Eulogy" is drawing parallels between discarded materials and the violent treatment of Black people in the United States. People in the African Diaspora have a long history of repurposing, remixing, and transforming oppressive systems into valuable cultural practices. In this post-Ferguson moment, Lindley is calling on this legacy to imagine how we can recycle the energy of protest, rage, and grief into creating a world where, indeed, Black Lives Matter.

"This Ain't A Eulogy" is the origin story of The Bag Lady, and serves as a preamble to Lindley's one woman show "The Bag Lady Manifesta" which debuted at Dixon Place September 2017. TajaLindley.com”

Rasheeda Phillips: Community Futures Lab 

Community Futurisms: Time & Memory in North Philly* is a collaborative art and ethnographic research project exploring the impact of redevelopment, gentrification, and displacement in North Philadelphia through the themes of oral histories, memories, alternative temporalities, and futures. From May 2016-May 2017, BQF Collective operated Community Futures Lab at 2204 Ridge Avenue, which functioned as a gallery, resource and zine library, workshop space, recording booth, and time capsule, recording oral histories/futures in the North Philly neighborhood of Sharswood.

 Torn Apart/Separados

“Volume 2 of Torn Apart is a deep and radically new look at the territory and infrastructure of ICE’s financial regime in the USA. This data & visualization intervention peels back layers of culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018.”

“As we have gathered and curated this data and produced these visualizations, we share certain underlying assumptions: the express knowledge that data is imprecise, impure, and as much a tool for incarceration and control as it is for revealing the truth; that maps, which have become of primary importance to our daily life, are themselves highly contingent fabrications, bending the physical reality of the world to our innate need to grasp and process, and dangerously full of altered data.”

Class Notes

Opening Reflection: What are words that describe the relationships you would like to have with the “community” or the “public” beyond ENGAGEMENT?

Orientations:

HISTORY OF LABOR UNIONS

Class Notes

Student Unionism

History of Unions

Case Studies

Professional Air Traffic Organization (PATCO)

Panel

What role does social justice play in unionism? How do you make your union space inclusive?

TEACHER UNIONIZING IN PHILADELPHIA

Class Notes

Panel with WE Caucus!

Liza, Art Teacher at Barton School

Amy Roat, ESL Teacher at Feltonville Arts and Sciences

Bobbie Benjamin, school nurse at McCall School

Alison Stuart, teacher at McCall School

Phone Banking Training

BELONGING IN PHILADELPHIA

Opening Reflection

Where do you feel like you belong?

(Map of Penn)

Land Acknowledgement

Belonging & Politics of Belonging

Sites of Erasure

STUDENT & YOUTH ORGANIZING: IMPACT & MEMORY

Small Discussion Groups

Behold the Walls

Power Politics

Panel:

Ishmael Jiminez, Teacher, Facilitator for Youths United for Change, & involving students in ITAGS

Chris Rogers, Board Member of Philadelphia Student Union, Curriculum Chair for BLM Week of Action, & Cultural Organizer

VanJessica Gladney, Co-Founder of Penn Slavery Project

RECLAMATION & RESISTANCE

Class Notes