Engaging Communities and Publics

Week 6 - 10/3/2019

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- Author, Book Linked, p. xx

Openings

Syllabus

Class Notes

Slides

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"The Boss" by Prentice H Polk (1932) "The self-crafted images...show complexity and often reveal contradiction" In reading Eve Tuck's Suspending Damage: A letter to communities, the question of how research empowers/damages communities stood as a critical question for me. While there is power in recognizing the harm that has been done to oppressed people, to view their experiences as essentially damaged, buys into the colonial view that dehumanizes and essentializes people. For more about Polk, see: https://sfbayview.com/2015/02/p-h-polk-one-of-10-essential-african-american-photographers By @me_is_rey

A post shared by Activism Beyond the Classroom (@actbeyondtheclass) on Oct 3, 2019 at 11:06am PDT

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Education activists at Penn, calling for the university to support Philadelphia Public Schools, through a PILOT (i.e. payment in lieu of taxes) agreement. (Image from WHYY) . “When I make a public comment, I donʼt care if it conforms to the etiquette of a speech manual. Iʼm 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.” - Steven Salaita . “Thatʼs how we win. Thatʼs how the downtrodden have always won. By defying the logic of recrimination.” - Steven Salaita . Reading Steven Salaita’s “My Life as a Cautionary Tale: Probling the limits of academic freedom,” which unapologetically details his ostracization from academia due to extramural comments and outrage about the continued occupation of the West Bank, I was reminded of two things: 1) Frances Fox Piven’s first strategy for mobilizing and deploying interdependent power: break the rules. 2) Bettina Love’s call for co-conspirators in social justice work. The role of co-conspirator requires more than superficial engagement – co-conspirators put their bodies, their reputations, their lives on the line to advance equality. . I often ask myself, “What does it mean that I’m the University of Pennsylvania, a bastion of privilege and exclusion, a site of historical and current violence? How can I practically use this education which will give me differential access to power and resources?” Bringing together Salaita, Piven, and Love, I’m starting to see a path of leveraging this education to gain access to spaces of influence and then breaking the rules. That might mean resisting the norms and etiquette that typically allow us to access these spaces, refusing to wait for permission to speak or act, exposing injustice and epistemic violence, speaking up about inequality and complicity, showing outrage, questioning institutional actions and interests, honoring and including community knowledge, advancing transparency and accountability – even if that means navigating or assuming risk in the struggle.

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How do we understand the public(s) and communities imagined in public and community engagement?

Re/imagining engagement, communities, publics

Eve Tuck. (2009). “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 79, no. 3, pp. 409–428.
M.E. Torre et al. (2012). Critical participatory action research as public science. In Camic, P. & Cooper, H. (Eds.). The handbook of qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design, 2nd edition (pp. 171-184).
Michael Warner. (2002). “Publics and Counterpublics” Public Culture, Volume 14, Number 1, Winter 2002, pp. 49-90.

What are the risks and responsibilities of forms of public and community engagement, particularly those that endeavor to critique or transform power structures?

Academic Freedom in the Digital Age

Michael Bérubé. 2019. MLA Profession. “Talking out of School: Academic Freedom and Extramural Speech.”
Judith Butler. 2018. Chronicle of Higher Education. “The Criminalization of Knowledge.”
Steven Salaita. 2019. Chronicle of Higher Education. “My Life as a Cautionary Tale: Probing the Limits of academic freedom.”

Penn and Philadelphia Communities

Penn and Slavery

Vanjessica Gladney. Feb. 28 2018. “We Challenged Penn to Reexamine Its History of Slavery—And Our Project Isn't Over.”34thStreet.
Abul-Aliy Muhammad. July 21 2019. “As reparations debate continues, the University of Pennsylvania has a role to play.” The Philadelphia Inquirer.

What can we learn from models of engagement with communities that are participatory, desire-centered, or anti-oppressive in purpose and practice?

Modeling Community and Public Engagement

BxCRRB: Bronx Community Research Review Board
The Marian Cheek Jackson Center: Soundwalk of Northside
Histories of Home: A Walk With Northside Neighbors:
Morris Justice Project (Bronx, New York)
Taja Lindley: The Bag Lady Manifesta. “This Ain’t a Eulogy: A Ritual for Re-Membering.” (Running time: 10 min)
Rasheeda Phillips: Community Futures Lab (North Philadelphia)
Torn Apart/Separados mapping project

Class Recap

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"Censorship as a form of power shows weakness" - Butler
KP
— Activism Beyond the Classroom (@ActBeyondClass) October 3, 2019

"Why is it considered order when people drink alcohol on a blanket in Central Park, but disorder to drink alcohol on a South Bronx stoop?" #MorrisJusticeProject

KP
— Activism Beyond the Classroom (@ActBeyondClass) October 3, 2019

Quotes from Class Notes

Universities position themselves as apolitical, concerned with objective truth. But there is no such thing as political neutrality in education.

Much of academic research that purports to be a critique of oppression is centered in “damage-centered” research.
Damage-centered research is invested in reparative justice (413): focuses on past harm, calls for reparations. Communities tolerate this data-gathering as a strategy for combating oppression. But is this theory of change actually effective? Does the loss of complex personhood outweigh the benefits of reparations?
Damage-centered approach can be an initial step, but it’s not sufficient. Reparations can support improvements in material conditions, increase health of communities. Advocacy based on damage doesn’t fully address social structures like racism, as perhaps approaches that include complex personhood, beyond victimhood.
Recognition of community knowledge and expertise - we need the community as partners in research, partners in design, partners in inquiry. We can’t design questions and solutions on our own, when we are complicit.
What are the tensions between academic freedom and political expression?
Could educators create a review board? Most schools don’t have the capacity to say no to institutions like Penn.

2019, TheoriesKrystal StrongOctober 3, 20192019, Theories