Author Archives: scott

CFP Roundup

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Now that I’m a graduate student, I’m in the constant search for conferences and calls for papers related to things I’m interested in. I know at least some readers are in the same boat, so I’m going to start linking to relevant info whenever I run across it. If you know of anything related to the broad, broad topics I look at, feel free to send them to me and I’ll post them here. Without further ado, some items of interest:

This spring, The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference will be centered around the topic of “Failure.” The conference will be on February 15 and 16 in Milwaukee, and the deadline for submissions is Dec. 10.

Politique Africaine‘s October 2013 issue will be centered on the mining boom in Africa. Abstracts are due by December 15. More info at the African Politics Conference Group.

The Center for 21st Century Studies at UW-Milwaukee also has a Call for Papers for its May 2-4 conference, “The Dark Side of the Digital.” The conference is looking for “critical, historical, and theoretical papers and creative presentations that shed light on some of the dangerous but overlooked consequences of the 21st-century transformation from mechanical reproduction to digital remediation. Deadline is Jan. 4.

The third Theorizing the Web conference will be in New York City on March 2nd. It’s a conference looking for “critical and theoretical explorations of digital technologies.” Deadline is January 6.

The Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School is hosting a conference on New Directions in Global Thought on June 3 and 4 in Cambridge.

Update: The Department of Religion at Montreal’s Concordia University is hosting its Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference, with a call for paper whose deadline has been extended to Dec. 15. They are accepting calls for the conference’s theme, “Brave New World: Traditions and Transitions” as well as the special section on “Order and Chaos: The More Things Change.”

Weekend Reading

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Rounding out the Thanksgiving weekend, it’s always a good idea to enjoy some reading:

The conventional wisdom going into the election was that President Obama and the Democrats would have to galvanize the youth vote if they wanted a repeat of 2008. With nearly 20 percent of families, and 40 percent of young families, owing a slice of the education debt, the issue affects a large and growing constituency. And because existing student loan policy is so anti-student and pro-bank, Democrats could have proposed a number of commonsense, deficit-neutral reforms, even reforms that would have saved the government money. The stars were aligned for a major push.

Remarkably, it didn’t happen. Instead we saw dithering, half-measures, and compromises meant to reassure voters that politicians were aware of their suffering and that something was going to be done. The moves that were implemented did not address the core problem: the amount of money debtors will have to pay. For example, President Obama claimed credit for delaying a doubling of interest rates on federal loans from 3.4 to 6.8 percent, while, at the same time, ending interest grace periods for graduate and undergraduate students. The first measure is temporary and is expected to cost the government $6 billion; the second is permanent and will cost debtors an estimated $20 billion in the next decade alone. Despite his campaign rhetoric, President Obama has overseen an unparalleled growth of student debt, with around a third of the outstanding total accruing under his watch.

Part of the municipal debt story can be traced to New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis, when the city almost defaulted on its debt. New York was able to avoid bankruptcy at the last moment by issuing guaranteed bonds backed by public pension funds. As a result, the Emergency Financial Control Board, the municipal body that controlled the city’s bank accounts, was in the position of rewriting the social contract, exerting control over labor at every level. Union leadership agreed to the deal because they feared a bankruptcy filing would void labor contracts. Only after the city had disciplined the unions did the federal government move in with rescue loans.

New York City had been debt-financed since the 1960s. But the fiscal crisis of 1975 inaugurated a new funding paradigm for distressed municipalities: taxpayer-backed debt is issued to service the debt already on the books. American municipalities are now increasingly financed not with public money, but with private loans, and the pace of this shift has accelerated since 2008.

Austin had adopted its at-large election system, in which there are no geographic districts or wards, in 1953. As long as the City Council was elected at large, campaigns had to be run citywide, and funded not by private donors but by the white business community, which in the ’50s and ’60s had no interest in giving minorities a seat at the table.

The Voting Rights Act threatened to undo all that, and so the gentlemen’s agreement was devised as an end run around the law—a way to provide minority representation while maintaining control of city governance, keeping a paternalistic and frankly racist system in place. Since its institution, white business interests—not the city’s black and Hispanic communities—have selected acceptable minority candidates and backed their campaigns.

Wanja Muguongo on Exporting Homophobia

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On November 1, Wanja Muguongo, a Yale World Fellow and the Executive Director of UHAI – The East African Sexual Health and Rights Initiative, spoke at Yale’s African Studies program’s weekly speakers’ series. She spoke about homophobia in Africa and the role of the West. I have been meaning to write a recap of what was said, and am finally doing so now for two reasons. Firstly and unfortunately, Uganda’s parliament is again revisiting the infamous anti-gay bill; in addition, an African Studies reading group which I have organized will be discussing Stanley Kenani’s “Love on Trial” [pdf] soon, which is relevant to all of this as well. Below is my attempt to cover everything that Muguongo said at the event, which was cut short (hence the abrupt ending).

It’s important that you understand where I’m coming from and who I am, so a bit about myself and my beliefs: I manage a fund that supports NGOs, and we are a resource but also part of a movement. The conversation of LGBTI rights doesn’t take place in a vacuum; it takes place in a world of power and patriarchy. On top of this, I believe that band-aids don’t help, and that you need to tackle problems to fix them. Ending anti-gay laws doesn’t end hate fundamentally, but it’s a step in the right direction. We must also tackle sex workers’ rights by allowing them to fight oppression and patriarchy and change how society looks at sex. I believe there is way too much power in the world that is being used badly, and that normativity has always been a cause for bullying. I have chosen to endeavor to dis-empower bullies as much as possible. One of the things supporting power is religion being used as a mechanism of that power. Here, when I say religion I do not mean faith or belief, but the institution of organized religion. I have a problem with institutionalized religion as it is being used today.

Faith and belief are supposed to be kind and supportive, but when they are institutionalized they fail to do those things. Religion is about control and can be used to target outliers. We must contemplate what it means to be non-normative in a strongly religious community that supports hate and is intolerant. We tend to think of GLBTI/sex workers are people that are not of faith, which isn’t always true. Things are more complex than they seem. Continue reading →

Weekend Reading

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Read some links!

Conservatives have spent the last thirty years constitutionalizing their political-economic vision. Rather than respond in kind, liberals have insisted that the Constitution is largely silent on what William Forbath has called “the rights and wrongs of economic life.” This attempt to declare our nation’s highest law a neutral zone when it comes to political economy has failed, as conservatives have successfully associated our fundamental legal documents with an absolutist defense of private property and the restraint of government power over the so-called private sphere. Their legal analysis does political work, branding government regulation not just unwise but illegitimate: the Constitution means economic freedom and economic freedom means freedom from government coercion.

There is a counterhistory that liberals might have used, and still might use, to disrupt this chain of libertarian associations: the tradition of Forbath’s “distributive Constitution.” Proponents of this constitutional vision, from Madison to FDR, have denied that “economic freedom” simply means private freedom from public power, a definition that affirms the status quo, no matter how unjust. They have argued instead that the freedom promised by our Constitution guarantees material well-being and the real autonomy that comes with it, an autonomy threatened as much by the market as by the police on whom the market depends.

To act like detransition is something that can ONLY indicate a lack of not “really wanting it” or not “really being trans” is to demonstrate an enormously privileged mindset. One of the most basic kinds of privileged-bias: assuming things are as easy or difficult for everyone as they were for you.

Anyway… that idea of transition, and transness, as inherently linear is just as protected for its superficially “validating” qualities as the essentialism of “gender identity”, “male/female brains” and “men’s and women’s clothes”. It, again, allows us to feel our identified gender is every bit as valid and secure as our cis peers, while remaining on more or less the same kind of conceptual ground as the cis-centric view of gender. We can feel ourselves valid and secure without having to dive into the scary, uncharted waters of granting ourselves that validity, unconditionally, and on our own terms. We can continue feeling there’s some kind of external, quasi-objective standard by which we know ourselves to be “really” women… “deep down”.

Teenage pregnancy has been on a steady decline since the late 1950s, but nothing brings America into more of a panic than the thought of “unwed teen mothers.” These women, often poor with little access to education, are tracked like plague victims. One can’t find statistics without falling into a discussion of disease. “Teen pregnancy—a preventable epidemic,” “U.S. teen pregnancy and syphilis rates rose sharply during George Bush’s presidency” read the reports.

There’s no biological reason to think of teenage pregnancy, in particular, as a form of sickness. Everyone knows that pregnancy is an organic result of sexual intercourse, whether it happens at 15 or at 35. The language indicates fear of a social disease: the threat of reproduction occurring outside the condoned sphere of the family.

In the nineties, talk of gay marriage sounded kooky and futuristic, like  something out of a left-wing version of “The Jetsons.” In the elections of 2004,  when measures against gay marriage passed in eleven states, the campaign  appeared to have backfired. Over time, though, the concerted emphasis on  marriage and the military generated increasingly potent political imagery:  elderly gay men pleading for recognition of their decades-long relationships,  lesbian ex-officers testifying with military terseness. The ennobling effect  that Sullivan had predicted came to pass. I felt it in 2005, when my partner,  Jonathan Lisecki, and I spontaneously got married during a trip to Toronto. When  you get married, your relationship is taken more seriously by those around you;  when you are also gay, the sense of public affirmation goes strikingly deep.  Friends reacted as if we had done something vaguely heroic. I realized, as with  coming out, that personal gestures ripple outward into politics.

However long it takes for a real victory to be certified—no matter what  happens on Election Day, it will be too early to unfurl a “Mission Accomplished” banner—the once ragtag march of lovers has acquired an air of inevitability.  Edith Eyde’s prophecy is almost fulfilled: gays are more or less regular folk.  All the same, many who came out during the Stonewall era are wondering what will  be lost as the community sheds its pariah status. They are baffled by the  latter-day cult of marriage and the military—emblems of Eisenhower’s America  that the Stonewall generation joyfully rejected. The gay world is confronting a  question with which Jews, African-Americans, and other marginalized groups have  long been familiar: the price of assimilation.

Some Debate on Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee:

Weekend Reading

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As we recover from the election’s end, let’s try to do some reading:

Yale-NUS is unfolding with the ethical and civic compromises that were so easy to foresee. But there is more to it than that. Yale-NUS is being conceived as the realization of a dream that has been harder, but not impossible, to implement in New Haven. That is the idea of a new, smooth and seamless, singular liberal-arts curriculum: centrally controlled, departmentless, and monolingual. (“Avoid[ing] the language barrier” was one thing that attracted Yale to Singapore, where the language of instruction is English.) Departments, in this view, are “silos,” presumed to “hobble” knowledge; they are supposedly stuck in a fractious condition of specificity.

What is proposed instead is something centrally conceived and regulated—more than a mere convenience in an authoritarian state. Yet on the intellectual front, this new model of the liberal arts disingenuously waves the flags of “difference” and “interdisciplinarity,” as if they were novel concepts. (“Many nations live by different traditions and norms,” the Yale-NUS Prospectus helpfully tells us.)

The surprise is that that model has already made inroads in New Haven, with the rise of homogenized, nondepartmental programs and majors with bland titles like “Humanities” or “Global Studies”—and excrescences like the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. The partial erosion of departments in New Haven has led, logically, to their complete absence at Frankenyale in Singapore. If the promised “feedback loop” between Singapore and New Haven succeeds, the two institutions in tandem will produce a new generation of conformist, dissent-averse managers and executives, particularly well suited for the new global boardroom and tea at Davos.

In 2002, on a Friday, Larry Page began to end the book as we know it. Using the 20 percent of his time that Google then allotted to its engineers for personal projects, Page and Vice-President Marissa Mayer developed a machine for turning books into data. The original was a crude plywood affair with simple clamps, a metronome, a scanner, and a blade for cutting the books into sheets. The process took 40 minutes. The first refinement Page developed was a means of digitizing books without cutting off their spines — a gesture of tender-hearted sentimentality towards print. The great disbinding was to be metaphorical rather than literal. A team of Page-supervised engineers developed an infrared camera that took into account the curvature of pages around the spine. They resurrected a long dormant piece of Optical Character Recognition software from Hewlett-Packard and released it to the open-source community for improvements. They then crowd-sourced textual correction at a minimal cost through a brilliant program called reCAPTCHA, which employs an anti-bot service to get users to read and type in words the Optical Character Recognition software can’t recognize. (A miracle of cleverness: everyone who has entered a security identification has also, without knowing it, aided the perfection of the world’s texts.) Soon after, the world’s five largest libraries signed on as partners. And, more or less just like that, literature became data.

And because I couldn’t not put in some links about the election:

African Studies and Militarization

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Last month, an article by David Wiley, “Militarizing Africa and African Studies and the U.S. Africanist Response,” [gated] appeared in African Studies Review. It’s an important look at what Africanist scholars face in an increasingly militarized field. The piece examines how area studies programs initially developed during the Cold War (for a quick look at that, read this) and how many scholars dealt with attempts to militarize their field. He discusses how there were some scholars in all area studies who were involved in policy-making, but that many were critical of American interventionist policies. Africanists were actually late to the game in this, Wiley explains, but once they did organize against U.S. foreign involvement, (in the 70s, in Angola and South Africa), it was strong and resolute.

Africanists had a lot to criticize in U.S. Africa policy, from backing dictators to arming rebels to assassinating democratically elected leaders. In an effort to gain favor, the Defense Intelligence Agency offered four Title VI universities (there are 11 universities with African Studies programs that receive funds from the Department of Education, among other Title VI centers for other areas) large amounts of funds to work with the government, an offer which they refused. Beyond that, the directors of all of the Title VI National Resource Centers for Africa voted not to apply for or accept any military or intelligence funding in 1982, and in 2008 reaffirmed that position, stating that:

We believe that the long-term interests of the people of the U.S. are best served by this separation between academic and military and defense establishments. Indeed, in the climate of the post–Cold War years in Africa and the security concerns after 9/11/2001, we believe that it is a patriotic policy to make this separation. This separation ensures that U.S. students and faculty researchers can maintain close ties with African researchers and affiliation with and access to African institutions without question or bias. Such separation, we believe, can produce the knowledge and understanding of Africa that serves the broad interests of the people of the United States as well as our partners in Africa.

At the same time, the Association of African Studies Programs also voted to reject military and intelligence funding for programs, and argued that no scholar or program should accept funding from those sources. But while these acts of independence began in the midst of the Cold War, and were reaffirmed in the context of U.S. involvement in the Global War on Terror and in Iraq, things have shifted in the last few years. With AFRICOM coming onto the field with it’s whole-of-government approach, Africanists have faced a growing threat in the militarization of academic scholarship. Wiley gives a long list of examples of AFRICOM’s actions on the ground:

  • Establishing Camp Lemonier in Djibouti as the base for AFRICOM and allied military units, in addition to ~2000 personnel in Stuttgart, Molesworth, and MacDill AFB
  • Establishing the Social Science Research Council in Stuttgart and supporting the Socio-Cultural Research and Advisory Team to provide troops with cultural knowledge.
  • Creating an AFRICOM liason unit at AU headquarters in Ethiopia
  • Building a CIA operations base in Somalia with prison, planes, and counterterrorism training for Somali intelligence agents.
  • Establishing bases in Seychelles, Djibouti, and Ethiopia for drones.
  • Expanding intelligence operations with private contractors.
  • Expanding U.S. Special Operations teams in countries without government permission (apparently based on a 2010 directive by Gen. Petraeus.
  • Training hundreds of African military officers at conferences.
  • Mounting AFRICOM-led operations in Libya and Somalia
  • Providing 100 troops to work with Central African armies in an anti-LRA campaign.
  • Increasing the number of army personnel stationed in Africa by 3000 in Central Africa, Mali, and Somalia.

In addition to all of this, AFRICOM’s whole-of-government approach has included engaging in both diplomatic and development work on top of traditional military duties. While some hail this as a more integrated approach, it also blurs the lines between military and non-military actors. As a result, State Department officials and USAID personnel, and even non-governmental aid workers, are being viewed as part of America’s military involvement in Africa.

While this was all occurring in Africa, in the United States the field of African Studies has faced a similarly forceful push of militarization. Wiley notes an “unprecedented surge of funding for studying Africa and African languages in the DOD, in intelligence agencies, and in military-focused higher education institutions.” He also estimates that “funding for the study of Africa in U.S. security agencies now exceeds that of American universities probably by a factor of fifty, perhaps more,” despite the fact that universities offer more languages and better instruction. On top of all of this, DoD also sponsors three programs to fund the study of Africa in civilian institutions: the National Security Education Program, the Minerva Research Initiative, and Human Terrain Systems (I worked briefly on a Minerva project while I was a fellow at ASU’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, and wrote about it and Human Terrain Teams here).

All of these programs are well-funded projects of the Defense Department, while the U.S. Department of Education cut 46% of Title VI area studies centers (including the 11 Africa universities), with the government favoring area and language study programs run by DoD. In addition to this, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Disseration Abroad and Faculty Research Abroad programs were suspended in 2011 and the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute was cancelled in 2012. With non-military funding opportunities shrinking, scholars (and students) are facing a dilemma in how to acquire funds to carry out research and teaching.

In this time of austerity, especially at public universities, there is a growing sense that civilian agency funding is collapsing and military and intelligence funding increasingly is the “only game in town.” As a result, two university African centers and linguists in two other universities that have Title VI Africa centers (with the dissent of their African center faculty), have taken funding for African language instruction programs from the DOD’s NSEP.

Africanist scholars are beginning to fall under the control of the military as DoD-funded projects dictate what they study, where they do research, and what questions they ask. From here, things will only get worse. Title VI universities are already worried about Foreign Language and Area Studies funding suffering even more egregious cuts (FLAS grants arrive in three-year packages, and the current round of funding expires next summer), and other sources of funding will also be disappearing if Congress continues to cut funding (one needs only to peruse the Department of Education grants site to see how many programs have been suspended or cancelled). Wiley paints a sad picture of where area studies programs stand now, and the possible future we might find ourselves in. If the military controls more and more funding for higher education, our colleges, scholars, and students will have less options. As DoD annexes the social sciences and humanities, will the leading African Studies programs in the country be able to maintain their independence from military control? Or will all researchers and students trying to work in the region be following the army’s orders?

Weekend Reading

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Another edition of weekend reading is here!

On Hurricane Sandy, Government Response, and Climate Change:

The presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, but climate change has decided to speak to them. And what is a thousand-mile-wide storm pushing eleven feet of water toward our country’s biggest population center saying just days before the election? It is this: we are all from New Orleans now. Climate change—through the measurable rise of sea levels and a documented increase in the intensity of Atlantic storms—has made 100 million Americans virtually as vulnerable to catastrophe as the victims of Hurricane Katrina were seven years ago.

This may seem obvious to some readers, but since the major media has been so neglectful, it seems to make sense to set the record straight. The majority of districts that are the most affected by Hurricane Sandy via power outages, no running water and lack of access to food are the same that are affected by broad, systemic patterns racial and economic injustice. Historically, most of the neighborhoods are the very same that experienced white flight during the mid-20th century while simultaneously being disenfranchised via redlining by banks and real estate agencies–a legacy that still greatly affects residents of these areas access to a long list of things other parts of the city take for granted: public parks and healthy, affordable food. Redlining succeeded in shutting off all opportunities for loans and other forms of economic investment in poor, minorities neighborhoods (in the instance of areas such as the South Bronx, Red Hook and East New York in Brooklyn).

The residents of these neighborhoods are the ones who still do not have power, who have not been featured in major news outlets cannot necessarily afford to take off from work, as stated in the Reuters article Hurricane Inequality: “Those with a car could flee. Those with wealth could move into a hotel. Those with steady jobs could decline to come into work. But the city’s cooks, doormen, maintenance men, taxi drivers and maids left their loved ones at home.”
For those working class folks who have been forced to take off work because they physically cannot leaves their homes or neighborhoods due to an utter lack of MTA service for days, they face even more challenges. [Working class people] “are losing money daily though rents are due today. And those who live here but work elsewhere can’t get there. It’s the end of the month and people can’t get their paychecks or if they are on government assistance and get their cards re-charged,” says one resident of Chelsea in lower Manhattan, “no one is taking cards and there are lots of poor people with no access to money – to cash. So, even if they are able to walk north to find stores open they can’t shop. it really is neoliberalism at it crudest – if you got [money], you can fend for yourself. if you don’t, f*** you – no one cares…” The city’s mass income inequality is indeed the root cause of disproportinate attention given to certain neighborhoods but still we find very few news outlets using basic critical thinking skills to understand why (save for this one by the Washington Post that was posted 7 hours ago).

And more reading:

The decline of professorial hiring is not due to overproduction of Ph.D.s. More people are in college than ever before; advanced research is more important, we all seem to agree, than it ever has been. The problem is universities’ refusal to create good academic jobs. As in the rest of the American economy, employers are waiting out would-be employees, seeing how low the cost of labor will fall. Hence the endless spate of articles with titles such as “Graduate School: Just Don’t Go” and “The Disposable Academic.” A much-beloved (among academics) series of animated videos stages conversations between undergraduate naïfs and embittered academics, all on the theme of “So you want to get a Ph.D. in ___.” Conservative pundit David Brooks chose the word “tsunami” to describe what awaits academia.

But this is a political conflict over priorities, not a natural disaster. And in this conflict, academics are losing. These changes in higher education are the result of concerted efforts by a coalition of university administrators, donors, and conservative politicians to seize institutional power and reorient the university system toward private purposes. As Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg argues in The Fall of the Faculty, corporate backers have installed an ever-growing army of overpaid administrators to superintend universities. From 1975 to 2008, faculty-to-student ratios stayed level, albeit with the portion of faculty who are tenured or tenure-track crashing. Meanwhile, the number of administrators doubled. This administrative staff is charged with supervising the faculty, making money off them where possible, and otherwise enlarging the endowment by extracting tuition and skimming funds from research grants. In return for the exorbitant tuition, administrators provide undergraduates with an increasingly fun experience, rather than an increasingly serious education.

Resilience in Lieu of Recovery

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In case you haven’t heard, New York City (as well as much of the northeast, the tri-state area in particular) took a severe beating by Hurricane Sandy this week. Whole neighborhoods were flooded and torn apart, NYU Langone Medical Center lost power and had to evacuate, Breezy Point, Queens was burned to the ground. Many residents lucky enough to not be flooded out of their homes are still without power, and the damage to the public transit system has left many walking several miles to work or to get relief. Just look at some of these pictures and you’ll get the idea.  The city has responded with what could be called its typical resilience as subways have already begun to come back into operation and public servants are working around the clock to bring things back to normal.

Oh, and the NYC Marathon is going to go ahead as scheduled.

The ING New York City Marathon has been re-branded as the Race to Recover, donating $1 million to relief efforts and urging participants to donate as well. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated that New York is a city “where we have to go on” and cited resilience above all else. In addition to arguing for a return to normalcy, he also argued that the monetary benefits from runners coming into the city would contribute to helping the city recover.

But can you really begin the return to normalcy with a grand event when everything “normal” about life – shelter, food, electricity, transportation – is still missing? And can you really use money from sponsors and participants as a primary argument for relief efforts? He might as well tell hurricane victims to go to the mall and spend their way into a regional recovery, a la George W. Bush. Regardless, the marathon organizers and the mayor have decided to plod on towards mile marker 26.2.

Let’s take a second and think about what the costs are of running a functional marathon would be:

  • In a city with public transit in minimal operation and with streets packed with taxis and buses, you will need to close a lot of roads to accommodate the marathon route.
  • In a city where first responders are still dealing with catastrophic effects of the disaster, you will need police to block those roads and ensure runners’ health and safety.
  • In a city where food and water are scarce and in dire need, where people are going without food or water due to a host of issues (no electricity means food stamp cards don’t work, the storm flooded some stores, difficulty to travel makes going shopping harder, non-functioning elevators makes leaving tall buildings even more difficult, etc.), you will need to divert some of those supplies to the runners (running a marathon, after all, is taxing on the body).
  • In a city where some hotels have stepped up and allowed displaced New Yorkers to relocate from homes that are flooded, burned down, or without power, marathon runners will be flying in and need a place to stay. (At least one hotel owner has decided to do the opposite).
  • In a city where infrastructure has taken a hit and electricity, subways, and rails are below optimal levels, prioritizing an event that could be postponed distracts resources that could go towards people in need.
  • Apparently, resources are already being drained from potential relief efforts as volunteers and NYPD officers work to set up barricades, tents, generators, and food trucks for Sunday. I don’t see how that doesn’t interfere with relief efforts.

But at least New York will be back to normal on Sunday.

Update: I posted this, and immediately found out that the marathon was cancelled. This is definitely the right decision, but it’s also definitely a late one. It was an unnecessary debate, and there are already a number of runners arriving in NYC. Hopefully relief efforts will take precedence over any other big ticket events, and we can return to real normalcy soon.

Silencing Propaganda: When Art and Speech Become Violent

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Last week, my history class discussed the death of Thami Mnyele, a South African anti-apartheid activist and artist who was killed in an attack by South African forces in Botswana. Mnyele, the subject of a biography by Diana Wylie (which was our reading for class), was a South African artist whose works went from emotional depictions of oppression under Apartheid to campaign posters as a part of the Medu Art Ensemble. He was also an anti-apartheid activist influenced by Black Consciousness and was a part of the ANC’s militant wing. Despite not being a high-level ANC leader, Mnyele was killed as a part of South Africa’s famous raid on Gaborone in 1985, when South African soldiers crossed into Botswana in the middle of the night to attack a number of ANC safe houses.

My professor told us to ignore his militant side and asked what it meant to consider whether or not his murder was legal. What it meant to even think about saying it was okay to go across borders to kill an activist. I pointed out that it gives credence to South Africa’s argument that propaganda is violent. But I didn’t say that because I thought the government was wrong – propaganda can definitely be just as violent as a gun or a bomb – words and images have power. I was merely pointing out that contemplating whether or not crossing borders to kill activists is okay implies that it could be. But I suppose the real question is, at what point is it okay to silence that speech? And back to my professor’s point, what does it mean to consider that as an option?

Looking at Mnyele’s art (Wylie’s book is replete with images), my mind kept coming back to Aaron Bady’s recent ruminations on free speech and its place in America. In looking for the line between speech and violence, he argues:

My point is not that any of this is or isn’t legitimate; some forms of speech are odious, and if the state has a right to prohibit, criminalize, and punish “violence,” then criminalizing speech is just one of those things it’s going to do, and does. But the difference between behaviors which are prohibited and those which are protected has nothing to do with the red line between speech and violence, and never has, because  no such line exists.

We’ve been dealing with this a lot, be it freedom to camp in parks as expression or right to post other people’s photographs online. To what extent is expression or speech or art okay, and to what extent does it need to be silenced by censorship, arrest, or even murder? At what point is shooting up an Obama campaign sign or tweeting that #AGoodJew is #ADeadJew something that must be stopped? And at the more extreme end, at what point does anti-state speech warrant assassination? Mnyele was clearly an enemy of the South African government – he was actively opposed to its rule, and worked against it – militarily, yes, but primarily through art and recruitment. Similarly, Anwar al-Awlaki was allegedly involved in planning some terror attacks, but his true value to al Qaeda lie in his ability to preach and recruit for the cause; Samir Khan was an editor for a magazine published by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Like Mnyele, neither were high level operatives, but both were effective recruiters through propaganda. Both were American citizens killed by a drone strike in Yemen without due process, solely because of the threat their speech possessed.

In light of the drone strike, the questions mentioned before have been flipped around. Because Apartheid = Bad, and America = Good, al Awlaki’s death is made to seem okay. Instead, people are left to debate what it means to even consider that killing him was wrong. People who raise his rights as an American citizen and point to his low-threat position in militant operations are shunned in the name of national security. “But he was al Qaeda.” But what does it mean to consider that this killing is okay? Again, it means that you’re giving credence to the state’s assertion that preaching and publishing warrants death. And again, it’s not that recruiting through speech and expression can’t have negative effects – it’s that we haven’t been able to find the point at which it’s okay (and as a result, find the point at which it’s not okay) to silence our opposition. And this is because, perhaps like the line between speech and violence – it doesn’t exist. The state will always weild its right to crack down on its enemies, we just have to wait and see who falls into what category. The government will decide who falls into the category threatening enough to put a name on a list. That’s how Mnyele was targeted, and that’s how Khan and al Awlaki were targeted.

But because that wasn’t enough, al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son would be killed two weeks later, and when asked how he could justify the killing, Press Secretary Gibbs explained, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children.” It’s not just the threat level that goes into determining if you deserve to live or die. It seems, in some cases, your lineage is enough to warrant your guilt, and therefore your assassination – but we already knew that.

Connecticut Colleges Respond to Sandy

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Saturday and Sunday, virtually all of the schools in Connecticut announced closures for parts of this week.  Preschools, primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools across the state will be closed at least today, if not tomorrow or later. Even the University of Hartford, an hour north of the coast, will be closed through Wednesday. Across the state, bus systems closed last night, soon after New York’s MTA system was closed, and highways will be closing in a matter of hours.

Along the coast, universities and campuses in Stamford, Bridgeport, and New Haven are shuttered ahead of what promises to be a mighty hurricane. In New Haven, we’ve been watching the news pretty regularly to see how things go, and I’ve been keeping my e-mail open to see if Yale would close. By Saturday evening, all of the colleges in New Haven (University of New Haven, Southern Connecticut State University, Albertus Magnus College, and nearby Quinnipiac University, Sacred Heart University, and University of Bridgeport) had announced at least Monday and Tuesday closures. All of the colleges except Yale.

Yale waited until late afternoon Sunday to announce Monday’s closure, and they have yet to announce plans for Tuesday. The university seems to have begrudgingly cancelled classes yesterday afternoon, and I don’t see how it will remain open tomorrow, when the storm is at its worst. It’s a bizarre way to handle what is predicted to be a surge twice that of Irene.